When the gunshots started, they both had ducked low, Michael telling him to just calm down, Andrew thinking those words were more for Michael himself than for him. Afterward, Andrew had tried to open the door—locked—so instead he paced, asking Michael who he thought had been shooting, Michael telling him to calm down. This time the words were for Andrew.
Nothing happened for a few minutes. His whole body shivered. In the quiet, he kept seeing the guns in the intruders’ hands while he loaded the truck with Michael and Aiden. He remembered the shotgun barrel pressed against his spine when he dropped a jar, Travers telling him that he’d blow his head apart if he broke another, laughing after he pulled the gun away. He imagined them shooting Molly upstairs but shook the thought from his mind.
Someone unlocked the reserves. They perked up, and the light from upstairs lit up the wall in a triangle shape. Someone thudded down the stairs. Andrew grabbed Michael’s arm. He wanted to be brave, to face whatever was coming like a man. The figure sunk below the plane of the ceiling. Sean. Clothed again. He stood at the bottom of the steps, the glare off his flashlight obscuring his face.
“They’re gone,” he said.
Michael stepped forward. “Who is?”
Sean didn’t answer. He raised the beam of the flashlight to the shelves that once stood bursting with food, now like roadkill picked apart by vultures. Jars and cans lay on their sides, a few shattered across the concrete ground. He shined the flashlight back and forth. Not even half remained.
Sean covered his mouth and walked toward the shelving. Placed a jar back on its base. “Go to your wife,” he said, tilting his head toward Michael but not looking at him. “She needs you.”
“What happened?”
“Just go. She’s upstairs. Grab Aidan from the mudroom before you go. Cover his eyes the whole way up.”
Michael spoke, but could only say, “Sean—”
“Take him to his mom or sister. They’re with Kelly. Just cover his eyes. Please. Don’t ask questions.”
Michael looked at Andrew and started toward the stairs before Sean grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Cover his eyes, Michael. Cover them the whole way up.”
Andrew watched the exchange without breathing. Michael nodded and left. Andrew hung back, unsure if he should go too.
“They made you load the food into their truck?” Sean said.
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s like asking a man to dig his own grave.”
“Will they come back?”
“They don’t have enough to attack us. Even if they wanted to.”
“They had guns.”
Sean reached around his back and pulled out a pistol. Without hesitation, he pointed the gun at Andrew’s face, and Andrew recoiled, putting his hands out as if it were enough to stop a bullet. The gun clicked. Andrew winced. Stood still. Not dead. He lowered his shaking hands.
Sean didn’t have a sadistic look on his face, wasn’t playing a mean joke. His eyes looked drained of his soul, like Sean was no longer there. “This is what they had in their guns.” He held it upward. “Didn’t even have bullets.” A tear dripped from his eyes. “They’re not coming back.”
Andrew’s heart drummed in his throat. “Never again?”
“Don’t know. I’m not sure we have enough left to justify the risk.” He looked around. “I don’t know how this happened. How could I have let this happen?”
“I don’t—”
“We should have never let that man in here. He brought death with him. Into this home.”
“We’re all still—”
“It doesn’t make any sense. How can people do this? Why did they do this? The man was an engineer. A few months ago, he was an engineer.”
Sean kept rambling. Incoherent.
Andrew shuffled closer to the stairs while Sean continued staring at the stripped shelves. As he reached the base of the stairs, someone rushed down them. Elise. She slowed. The flashlight lit the outline of Sean’s body, the fringes of his clothing glowing, his core dark. She held her gaze on him for a moment and then turned to Andrew, hugged him, and said, “You okay? Did they hurt you too?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll live.”
She nodded and cupped his face with her hands. She swallowed hard and exhaled. Without saying any more, she approached her husband.
“Babe,” she whispered.
Andrew inched closer to the steps.
“Babe, talk to me,” she said, standing next to Sean and turning his face toward her.
“Where’s Aidan?” Sean asked.
“Michael took him upstairs.”
He paused. “You let that man in,” Sean said in a low voice.
She pulled back. “How can you say that?”
“We should have left him outside. You and your brother—you let him into our home.”
Andrew moved up a step.
“I was trying to help. I was trying to—”
“Help? This was helping?”
“This is not the time to be having this discussion.”
“Because you know it’s true?”
“Because what difference does it make now?”
The air hung with cold silence. Andrew went up another few steps.
“I’m sorry,” Sean said. “This isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”
Elise sighed and hugged him.
He pulled away after a moment. “I fell asleep on the job. He wasn’t even gone yet, and I was sleeping.” Andrew could see Elise’s throat rise and fall, Sean saying, “I just don’t understand. I hadn’t slept like that for so long.”
“The body eventually just shuts down,” she said.
“No. This wasn’t like that. When they woke me up, it was like I was in a haze. Like I had taken one of my—” He stopped, and his jaw grew stiff, and Andrew could see his muscles throbbing under his cheeks. “You didn’t.”
“Sean, I didn’t know—”
“You didn’t know what? That people were going to attack us?”
“I didn’t think—”
“You never think. I saw you and your brother talking. Oh, Sean’s so paranoid. Sean needs to sleep. I didn’t need to sleep.”
“Sean.”
“Did you give me a sleeping pill?”
“I didn’t know—”
“Did you slip me a pill or not?”
“I crushed it up and put it in your potatoes. I thought you needed sleep. I thought you would—”
She saw it too late, Sean raising his hand, winding his arm back to deliver a blow, his eyes boiling with a fury Andrew had seen before—in his own father’s eyes. Sean pulled his hand back at the last moment, Elise flinching though, mouth open and hand pressed against her cheek as if Sean had gone through with it. He held his open hand up, primed his fingers into a fist, and let it drop to his side. “You killed us,” he said, his voice cracking. “You killed us.”
Andrew slipped the rest of the way up the stairs and came into the kitchen, his lungs constricted, scarcely able to take in air. He put his hands on his knees, taking in deep breaths before moving to the base of the steep stairway.
He climbed upward, noticing the first trace of a bloody footprint three fourths of the way up, the prints growing darker and clearer with each rising step. The stairs were dusted with drywall fragments, pellet holes along the wall. His eyes crested over the last step, and he jolted back and stumbled down two steps before grabbing the railing and steadying himself.
This was all wrong. All of it. He didn’t want to live in a world where Sean, who cared so much for his family—he saw the concern and love in the man’s eyes every day—almost hit his own wife. That was what Andrew’s dad had done. Not Molly’s. Not the man he knew. He didn’t want to live in a world where a man might chop off someone’s finger for no reason. Or a world where a dead body was at the top of the stairs, half his neck blasted away so that his head craned over at a ninety-degree angle, dark blood fanning out from under his neck like a bib tucked into his collar. This wasn’t the world he wanted. For himself.