Maybe she needed to be a madman too.
Eventually, the road began to look familiar to her. She realized that she’d travelled around this part of the woods on foot as well as on the road. She was nearly back. She took a deep breath, feeling relieved. But she knew she had to stay vigilant. Peaches’ house was filled with supplies which made it a target for looters. She had to be prepared to come across someone inside.
But the night was silent as she parked up outside Peaches’ house. She guessed it was her house now. She felt disrespectful as she unlocked the front door and let herself inside, but she hoped that Peaches would want her to be there. She’d tried so hard to save her. All she had wanted was for her and Peaches to make it out of there alive. But as she stood alone in the quiet house, she knew that she couldn’t blame herself for what happened to Peaches. If she did, it would drive her crazy. Tex was the one with blood on his hands, not her. Aby did her best to get them out of there...it just so happened that her best wasn’t good enough.
Aby was overwhelmed by her own exhaustion, but she knew she had to secure her supplies and the house before she even tried to rest. It was a nice distraction in some ways, unloading her loot from the car and making sure the house was as safe as possible. She put a heavy cabinet in front of the doorway to make it more difficult to break in. She told herself that the following day she’d get to work on securing the windows too, if she had the energy. But by the time she had finished up her work, she knew she needed to let her body rest. She took a few painkillers with water to stop her body from hurting so badly, but there was nothing she could do about the images of torture that continued to flash before her eyes. She was messed up. She’d once considered herself to be a stable before, but now, she was shaking as she crawled into Peaches’ bed. She was slowly coming undone, and it was taking all of her strength to hold herself together.
But in Peaches’ bed, she could almost pretend for a minute that things were okay. As the drugs began to kick in and her body didn’t hurt so much anymore, she sank into the bed, realizing how comfy it was. She knew that she could close her eyes if she wanted to and she’d wake up if anyone tried to break in, but she lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling. She pretended that Jake was lying beside her, and the more she pretended, the easier it was to imagine the sound of his breathing next to her. She imagined that the landing light was switched on and that her electronic alarm clock she kept on her nightstand back home was emitting blue light, showing the time. She imagined that she could hear the sound of pipes in the house and the buzz of a lightbulb hanging above her head. She knew she’d never experience electricity again, but she could dream of it, at least.
The longer she lay there, though, the harder it was to pretend that things were normal. When she turned on her side to look at the opposite side of the bed, Jake wasn’t occupying the space. There was nothing but silence around her. There wasn’t even a slither of light with the curtains closed. This life that she was living now was nothing like she’d ever known. She’d been chased, tortured, intimidated, lied to and isolated. How had she gotten through the horrors at Tex’s house alone? How had she made it back to the house and made herself safe all by herself, all while dealing with the injuries Tex left on her body?
She had no idea how she’d survived it, but she was glad she had.
Feeling desperate to cling to the life she’d once known, she looked at the pictures Peaches had kept in her bedroom. There was a picture of her from years ago on her wedding day, looking beautiful and poised in a perfect white gown. There were pictures of her from more recently with friends on a girl’s holiday, drinking cocktails. There was one of her and her husband, smiling widely at one another, unaware of the fear that would await them in the future. Aby felt tears sting her eyes. All those people in the photos would never know how Peaches died. Even her husband had abandoned ship. Aby felt sick at the thought of him changing his mind and returning home to find her, but finding out she was gone. Left alone outside that awful house, lying dead on the floor in a pool of her own blood.
There was nothing you could do, there was nothing you could do, there was nothing you could do...
Aby squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn’t stop the tears from coming. They came hot and fast down her grimy cheeks. She looked down at her hands and realized she still had blood caked into the cracks in her skin, under her nails and up to her wrists. She could hear Tex’s laughter in the back of her mind. She was trembling uncontrollably. She felt like she’d never be clean again. She felt like she’d always be stuck in the memory of what happened to her and Peaches in that house. She couldn’t stop crying and she stopped trying to stem the
