checking that the shotgun was loaded.
'I want you and Justin to go completely around this house look for any foot tracks that lead away. I think Tommy left and I want to catch him before he does anything stupid.'
Travis went clockwise, Justin counter. I went back to the hummer where the snow was trampled down and tried to find a fresh set of tracks away from the vehicle. BT got wind of what was going on and went up to the barn to look. When the boys and BT all came back to me and shook their heads in the negative I went up to where I met Durgan and Eliza to see if the boy had followed my steps out there and then proceeded on.
I even got Henry into the fray. I figured he might not be a bloodhound and wouldn't be able to track a person, but the dog loved food and Tommy was a walking mini-mart. My heart was racing. I had once lost sight of Travis in a Target when he was about 5. Those thirty seconds had damn near made my heart explode. I was now up to about forty-five minutes of that sensation and I did not see a cessation in the near future. 'TOMMY!' I screamed. It came out a mixture of tortured bereavement and soul wrenching sadness.
'Mike,' Tracy said, placing her hand on my shoulder and handing me a foil packet. 'I found this on the ground behind the hummer.'
Tommy had written a note with a magic marker on an empty Pop-Tart packet. 'Dear Mr. Dad. I have gone to Lizzie. Please do not try and stop me.' I turned the packet over and inside out hoping there was more to it than just that. There had to be. Lives don't just end like this.
I knew Eliza had lied. Tommy was trying to save us all, at the expense of himself. For not the last time in this saga, I dropped to my knees and cupped my face in my hands. Tears of rage and sorrow poured through my fingers. BT stood in the snow next to me with a look of confounded anguish. Tracy rested against my back, her tears soaking into my jacket. The kids were lost in their own thoughts. Even Henry felt the pain of the loss, he howled like a Bassett Hound, something he had never done before and something I hoped he never had to do again.
Time was irrelevant. I could only mark passage by the frozen tears that had fallen to the ground. Nicole, or maybe it was Justin, hell, it might even have been Tracy, helped me to my feet. For a moment or two I twisted out of the haze of loss only because of the pain my locked knees caused when I attempted to use them. Someone put me behind the wheel of the hummer and maybe even started it. For a good four hours someone else that looked like me drove on that cold desolate roadway but it wasn't me. Someone that could almost be my twin was even nice enough to refill the tank and toss the 55-gallon drum out of the trunk. I would have to send them a Thank You letter later on. Jed and Jen's deaths had hit hard. I thought it could not get worse than when Brendon was killed, but this…this was intolerable. The emotional pain had forced me out of myself. I was on autopilot. Every time I thought of his smiling face trying to hand me some ungodly disgusting flavor of Pop-Tart, I would start to cry again. Unlike previous times, I didn't care who saw me. I was living but I wasn't alive.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - TOMMY'S DISAPPEARANCE - 
Tomas had heard everything his sister had told Mr. Dad. He had no doubts that she would follow through with her threats. Lizzie was not one for idle intimidation; he had witnessed firsthand the depths her cruelty could take. Tomas could not watch another family he loved be killed merely for the sinister amusement of Lizzie.
He would stop this here and now. He would willingly give himself up to her, and before he would allow her to do to him whatever she needed to survive, he would make her promise that she would not harm the Talbots, ever. She would listen to him. She was his sister after all. With that thought in his head Tommy waited for his best chance to get away undetected. Tommy possessed more than a few of the powers his sister did and in all likelihood many more. Tommy could have walked away in plain sight and not been detected if he knew how to control it. As it was, he waited until everyone was in the house before he walked over the iced tracks the humvee had made coming up the driveway yesterday morning.
When Tommy felt he had gotten far enough away from the homestead he jumped into a small culvert. There he waited, covering his ears when he heard his dad crying his name. Tommy had been crying too. On more than one occasion he almost got up and walked back towards them, but all he could see if he walked that path were gravestones engraved with the names of the people he loved. That walkway was already long enough. He would not add to it, not this time, not ever again. He drove his fists deeper into his ears, oblivious to the pain he was causing himself. Tears pooled around him.
Tomas had been so intent on blocking out all extraneous sensations he had missed the noise of the Talbot clan as they had passed on by. Early nightfall was threatening on the horizon when he finally looked up. 'Stupid, stupid,' he said to himself, rubbing the remains of his tears away from his eyes and cheeks. The farmhouse that just the night before had seemed so safe now looked oddly menacing. No residual warmth remained there, only cold, impersonal death. Tommy stood up easily, having not felt any ill effects from being in a kneeling position in the cold snow for near on 4 hours. He never wondered why he never felt pain or got sick. It was just the way it had always been for as long as he could remember. He thought maybe it was because he was 'special' like Lizzie used to tell him.
Tomas looked once to the house, once to the roadway and then headed out across the field in an easterly direction. He was walking a straight line to the psychic beacon that his sister was sending out. Within a half hour he found himself face to face with her. His need to hug and kiss her were thwarted by the indifference she flared all around her.
'Welcome brother,' she intoned, without even a remote hint of love or caring.
'Hi Lizzie,' Tommy, said looking down at his shoes, wishing he was anywhere but here.
'I'm so glad you could make it,' she said without regard.
'You'll leave the Talbots alone?' Tommy fairly begged.
'Oh come now brother, what does the death of one more perishable family mean to you. You are immortal like I am!' she shouted.
'I am nothing like you, Lizzie,' Tommy said meekly. Lizzie laughed mockingly at him. 'You will leave the Talbots alone or I will leave again.'
'Oh it is far too late for that, Tomas. As for the Talbots, I do not think that I am quite done yet. He has defied me twice and I do not suffer fools gladly.'
Tommy was panicked. He had done no good here; he had in fact made matters worse. If he had stayed away for a month, two at the most Lizzie would have died, no, Eliza would have died. Lizzie died 500 years ago. Tommy started to cry anew.
'Come, come brother. I will kill his family quickly if that makes you feel any better, but Michael, he will suffer in ways I have not yet dreamed.' Her bitter laugh mirrored Tommy's feelings. 'There is someone here that is going to help. Maybe you will recognize him.'
Tommy saw the man being pushed up to Eliza's side. 'Doc?' Doctor Baker looked like he had suffered greatly at the hands of his sister, and his family was nowhere to be seen.
Tommy registered Durgan's presence a fraction of a second too late. His sister had completely blocked his senses. The needle plunged far too deep, and sleep followed immediately.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - JOURNAL ENTRY 25 - 
I had felt nothing, going on ten hours. I barely registered the Maine Stateline sign hanging askew. The most conversation since we had left the Powell House revolved around a bathroom break and even that was a pinched conversation. Pardon the pun. Tommy was one of our own. He was the shining light. He was the hope of a new dawn. All of that was lost. He was lost. We were lost. Eliza wasn't going to let us go. She was too prideful and too filled with hate to let anybody that stood up to her go unpunished.
Sure we might go unnoticed for a couple of months, but as soon as Justin ran out of his shots she would be able to home back in on him and we'd be on the run again. My thoughts were as black as the night, without even a single star to light my way. Would anybody protest if I just drove on into the ocean?
So this is what my life is reduced to. I will watch as those around me fall. Maybe I will get lucky and be next, then I won't have to suffer through this anymore. I don't know how much more of this I can take, my soul is already damn near transparent. I have done everything that is within and possibly beyond my human ability and still I have come up woefully short.
The slow, steady forced march to death that all of us experience has now turned into a 4x4 relay race. Jen
