“You did the right thing for him,” Amber said.
“I hope that’s true.”
“What will you tell their families?”
Ricky looked at her and then down to the stake he was still holding. It seemed to have lost its power, now that it was sullied with death. He dropped it and let it hit the carpet at their feet and then he kicked it towards the closet.
“I don’t know,” Ricky said through numb lips. “I don’t have any idea.”
# # #
Amber’s head was throbbing by the time she got home. On the way, she had stopped and bought two big bottles of water. They were empty, but she still felt dehydrated and queasy. Sleep would be the only thing that would cure her. She had no intention of giving into that impulse until she was far away.
Amber left the car in the driveway of her uncle’s house and jogged for the door. There wasn’t a lot in the house that she needed. She had been living in the house like it was a museum dedicated to preserving the memory of her uncle’s former life. It had never become her own place, for good reason. Her stay there was always assumed to be temporary, both by her and her extended family.
At the foot of the stairs, she paused to look at the door to the hall closet. That was where she had dispatched the evil intruder last summer. Her neighbor had warned her that he was coming, and she had prepared herself while never admitting that she believed it could be true. In the months since, she had almost convinced herself that the experience had been a crazy dream.
“At least I’m sure that I’m not crazy now,” she said with a sad smile.
There was some guilt beginning to brew down in her stomach. It wasn’t fair—she hadn’t done a single thing wrong.
“Survivor’s guilt,” she whispered to herself and then nodded in agreement. The mere fact that she was alive and other people hadn’t made it…
She went upstairs and started piling all her clothes and shoes on the bed. With everything collected, she pulled together the corners of the quilt and left like some kind of terrible Santa. It all went into the back seat of her vehicle and she stared at the house, taking inventory in her head. There were toiletries upstairs. The kitchen was full of food. If anything, the place was less prepared for the winter than when she had moved in.
At one point, she had looked up different strategies for preparing a house to be unoccupied during the Maine winter.
The least she could do would be to make sure everything was locked and the heat was turned down. A responsible home owner would probably empty all the food out of the place, drain the plumbing, and shut off all but the essential circuits on the panel in the basement.
She smiled again and laughed at the idea. She had no plans to go anywhere near the basement.
With one more trip, she gathered the rest of her stuff and a bunch of the perishable food.
In the kitchen, her eye kept drifting to the cellar door and she refused to turn her back to it. The door was held shut by a simple latch, where the hook was barely through the metal loop. Whatever secrets the door was holding at bay, it looked like it wasn’t going to be able to keep up the effort for much longer.
Amber gave the door a wide berth when she left the kitchen with her bags.
In the hall, pressing herself against the wall to avoid the closet door, she remembered the back door. She hadn’t checked to make sure that it was locked.
Amber took everything out to the car and regarded the house from her vehicle.
She took a deep breath and decided it wasn’t worth it. In the end, a lock wasn’t going to make much of a difference if someone really wanted to get inside. There were only two houses on the dead-end road and it was miles long. Someone could come by and bulldoze the place and the vandalism wouldn’t be noticed for month.
Sitting in her car, about to key the ignition, she remembered one more thing.
The key for the post office box was on the side table, near the door.
“Damn it,” she whispered as she swung her legs out.
Her paycheck might be in the box. Amber rolled her eyes and got out of the car.
Shaking her head, she whispered, “I finally get enough sense to leave this place, but I can’t seem to get on with it.”
She climbed the porch stairs and opened the door.
Amber leaned inside and grabbed the key.
There was a sign over the bar in the living room. It said, “Work is the curse of the drinking class.”
Amber had seen that sign a hundred times since she moved in. It reminded her that this was the house where she had slept fairly soundly for a few months. The hotel was seventy-five miles away. There was no way that the creatures had beaten her back to the house.
“No,” she said. “Never again.”
She reached in and locked the front door and then walked around the exterior of the house to lock the back. In her car, she started it up and put it in reverse without a second thought.
# # #
Amber made it down to Virginia that Sunday.
She cut through a sliver of Maryland, crossed into Virginia, and pulled off the highway in a town called Winchester and followed the signs to a big hotel. It looked too familiar. She stared up at the balconies and pictured the inside of the place. Images of the Ridge Hotel kept popping into her head. She could just imagine being trapped up on the sixth floor with monsters tapping on her door and no way to escape.
The sun was beginning to set over the mountains in the west.
Amber used her phone to look for somewhere smaller. She found
