How had they gotten in? She checked the doors and windows more times than she can remember. She checked the closets and under the beds. She looked everywhere one of them might be hiding.
What had she missed?
What had she missed?
Oh god. What had she missed?
They could stand there forever. Something inside them shuts off when they don’t have prey in sight. It’s like they go into sleep-mode to conserve energy for the moment something made of living flesh bumbles by. Or makes noise in their sleep.
Lana always said she talked in her sleep.
Grief slices through her, sharp and hot. She tries to push it away, unwilling to deal with it now but it won’t be denied this time. Tears leak from under her lids, tracing itchy arcs along the sides of her face and pooling in her ears. They’re hot at first, then they cool as they puddle, and she wonders if the thing standing right out of her line of vision can smell them.
It’s probably just my imagination.
But what if it isn’t?
She can’t lay here wondering but she can’t move, either, and she curses herself for leaving the gun on the coffee table. It’s only a foot away, sure, but it’s also a mile away for all the good it will do her. She doesn’t know if she can grab it, aim it, and fire before it is on her. She’s not sure she can move that fast. She wants to believe she could, but she knows better. Doesn’t she?
There’s a small creak, like a floorboard settling under someone who has just shifted their weight. Except, they don’t need to shift their weight? They don’t seem to feel pain or cold or any other unpleasant sensation. Maybe she really is just imagining things.
“Dee.”
A thrill of fear shoots through her. The word is whispered so quietly she barely hears it. The plosive consonant and breathy vowel stretches out like the howling wind outside.
Maybe it’s just the wind. A tap of a branch on the window combined with the wind. Maybe she’s going insane.
Maybe she’s already insane.
She shuts her eyes and counts to ten, to twenty, to a hundred. No other noise except for the storm raging outside. Her mind stubbornly goes back to Lana, her Lana, the one person who could have held her hand and told her everything would be okay. It goes back to her, to her expressive eyes and her sense of humor and her stubborn streak and her survival instinct.
“Don’t get yourself killed for strangers, Dee. Don’t sacrifice your life to save anyone else. We have to get home to our boys.”
She failed her.
She is so fucking sorry.
She gets lost in the pain, the ache in her chest so fierce she wonders if she’s having a heart attack. The sobs are dammed up; she doesn’t dare let herself make noise, so she opens her mouth to let the pain out silently, trying desperately to keep her chest from bucking with the force of her grief. Everything goes away for a while, everything but the specter of Lana, who suffocates her.
When she can think again without diving into that endless well of sadness, when she can breathe without fear of loosing a sob, she realizes the room has lightened. She strains to see what lurks in the hallway but can’t pick anything out in the shadows that linger.
She moves her hand the tiniest bit, then a tiny bit more. Stop. Move. Stop. Move, inching herself closer and closer to the gun. She vows not to leave it this far from her again as she starts raising her hand, going even slower, gritting her teeth when her muscles protest their extra load. She wants to rush but can’t. Not if she wants to survive. Not if she wants to live. Not if she wants to see her boys.
Lana’s boys.
No. Not again. She shoves the memories away and locks them in the back of her mind from where they’d escaped. She can’t give into the grief. She owes Lana a proper mourning, but she can’t. Not yet.
Another slow inch.
“Dee.”
It’s not the fucking wind.
She lunges for the gun, her hand knocking it halfway across the table. The feral scream unnerves her, turning her muscles to water. She fumbles the gun again and it falls off the other side of the table with a heavy thunk. She jerks back, picks up the table and turns with it as the thing from the hallway—
There’s nothing there.
Heart thumping so hard it hurts, she pushes herself onto her knees, table still gripped in her fingers.
There’s nothing. Nothing there.
There has to be …
She drops the coffee table and grabs the gun, holding it in the double-handed grip Dan taught her. She approaches the hallway on wobbly legs, sure it will come roaring at her, fingers curved like claws, mouth open …
Nothing here.
She searches the whole house on legs that barely hold her, the trembling in her body worsening with every empty room, every monster-free closet, every bed under which nothing lurked.
The windows are locked. The doors are locked. Just as she left them the night before.
She sits on the stairs and cries.
17
Then
The next little town we came to was quiet. None of them loitered in the streets. There was no sign of the living, either. A couple cars stood abandoned in the middle of the street when we first came into town, but other than that, things looked neat. Put away.
Empty.
It was eerie.
“We need weapons,” Ivy said. “What the hell are we doing out here without weapons? Another reason to visit a farm. We might score a shotgun and some shells at the very least.”
I’d always been very anti-gun, but that was before people started eating each other. Having a gun now seemed more of a practicality than it had when 911 was still a thing.
I pulled up to a pump and parked, though I didn’t turn off the engine. We all watched for movement, for something to come running out
