We stepped off the steps and into the darkness. Someone had been waiting for us as the light immediately clicked on at the bottom. Aiden stood beneath the bulb, string in hand as he surveyed the three of us. His clear mahogany eyes, so similar to Abby’s, were still swollen with sleep, but he was alert.
“What’s going on up there?” he asked softly.
“It’s quiet, for now,” Cade responded.
Aiden nodded, his hand slid off the string. The door to the secret room creaked open and Abby poked her head out. “Can we eat now?”
“I told them to wait until everyone was here,” Aiden explained. “Yes.”
Abby ducked back into the room, she reemerged with the bag of food. My stomach felt empty, I needed nourishment, but my appetite was gone. “Is there any change in them?” I inquired softly about Peter and our mom.
“No.”
Abby handed me a thing of peanut butter crackers, I could only stare dumbly at it. “Will they ever wake up?” she asked softly.
My gaze drifted toward Cade as thoughts of the man from the street flashed through my mind. He had woken up. He had come back to life, either because the pain had been so excruciating, or because there was something about those suckers that reawakened their victims. Or maybe it was the aliens themselves that somehow triggered a reawakening in their victims. Maybe the aliens enjoyed watching people struggle, and suffer, before they died such an awful death.
I shuddered, the crackers crunched in my clenched hand. “Bethany,” Abby scolded lightly.
“We saw one wake up,” Cade said slowly.
“When? What? How?” Jenna squeaked in surprise.
Cade held my gaze for a long moment, but I wasn’t going to explain about the man’s reawakening. I couldn’t. He turned away from me. He told them what we had seen, and how the man had come back to life. And then he told about the man’s death.
The silence that followed his statement was thick and heavy. No one made a sound, no one moved, I was fairly certain that no one even breathed. “So extreme pain, or those creatures, maybe even the aliens themselves, can wake people up.”
“It could have just been that one man that was able to wake up again,” Bret pointed out.
I tossed the crushed crackers back to Abby. We could not afford to waste any food, no matter how destroyed it was, and I was not going to eat it. “Well how do we find out which one it is?” Jenna asked quietly.
The answer was obvious; no one wanted to say it. “The old man…” Aiden’s voice trailed off when Cade stiffened, bristling slightly.
“What would we do to him?” Abby asked breathlessly.
A muscle in Cade’s cheek jumped but he didn’t offer any protest. “I don’t know,” Bret responded.
“ Whowould do it?”
No one answered that time. I shuddered; nausea was boiling back through me. We would have to deliberately hurt Peter, deliberately be cruel to him in order to see if he would come back to life. The intentions were good, but carrying them out would not be. I also knew who would be the one to do it.
Cade would not look at me now, he stared into the darkness of the cellar, his jaw clenched tight. I wanted to tell him that it didn’t have to be him, but I knew that it would do me little good. And I could not lie to Cade, I could not offer him false words; everything inside of me was against doing such a thing.
“I won’t be long,” he said softly.
I took a step toward him, hating the haunted look on his face and the pinched set of his mouth, but he had already disappeared into the room. Bret tried to stop me as I turned away, but I shrugged his hands off. Biting on my bottom lip I struggled to keep my tears from spilling over. I didn’t hear anything from the room, I didn’t know what Cade was doing to him, but the smell of burnt hair suddenly drifted toward me.
I cringed, my hands dug into my arms to the point of bruising. I did not hear a yelp of pain, or a burst of motion like the man outside had shown. My heart sank. I didn’t turn back around when Cade reemerged, I was not disgusted with him; I was disgusted with all of us. He had possessed the strength to do what none of us had been capable of.
And he hated himself for it.
“Nothing.”
The simple word was like a dagger to my chest. What had we done? What had we stood by and allowed to happen?
What were we goingto do?
“How long can they stay like that before they die?” No one answered Abby’s question. No one knew. “They can’t stay like that for long, can they? I mean they have to eat, they have to drink; they have to go to the bathroomfor crying out loud! Don’t they?”
Still no one responded to her. “Don’t they?” she demanded.
“We don’t know Abby,” Aiden said gently.
A soft sob escaped Abby. I didn’t know the answers to her questions either, but I could at least give her some sense of comfort. I moved to my little sister, wrapping my arms around her as I took comfort in her warm body, and small arms. I still had Abby, I still had Aiden. I was more fortunate than most.
Far more fortunate.
I could not feel pity for myself; I could not cower in here, trapped and cornered. We had to survive, somehow. Abbyhad to survive, no matter what happened.
“What are we going to do?” Jenna asked her voice softer and smaller than usual.
“Not stay here,” I answered.
“Bethany, how are we going to get mom somewhere else?” Abby whispered fearfully.
It was Cade I looked toward, but it was Aiden that answered. “We don’t Abigail.”
I closed my eyes, wincing as pain lanced through me. Agony tore at my heart, shredding it, destroying it, turning me into something that I wasn’t. I wasn’t cold, I wasn’t uncaring, but I could feel something creeping over me, through me, that left me frozen. Not even Cade’s dark eyes could melt the iceberg taking over me.
“No!” Abby nearly screeched. I slammed my hand over her mouth, cringing as my gaze darted to the door at the top of the stairs. We all stood motionless, breathless as we waited to see if hell would descend upon us. I moved my hand slowly away from her mouth when it appeared that we were still safe. “No!” Abby hissed.
I clung tighter to her, but I barely felt her anymore, not through the ice encasing me. Aiden sighed softly, Jenna looked terrified, and Bret would not meet my gaze, only Cade stared at me head on. His eyes burned with the intense desire to make me understand, to make me see, but I already understood, I alreadysaw. I just didn’t like what I saw.
We couldn’t stay here.
It would only slow us down to bring her with us.
Or maybe we couldstay here. Maybe this would all blow over. We had food; we had water, a bathroom, and weapons. We had a secure hiding place; we could make a stand for awhile. It may even be better if we stayed. Why did everyone want to leave then, including me? Well, I wanted to leave because I hated to be trapped anywhere. For my mom though, I knew I could suck this up, I could stay in that room for however long I needed to.
We could all stay here. It would be fine, they wouldn’t find us, we would be safe until someone saved us, and of course someone would save us. We still had military, or at least I thought we still had a military, at the very least some military personnel. We had been out of touch for so long; shut off for so long, that I wasn’t sure we had a military anymore. For all I knew the aliens had taken them out first. In fact, they probably had been the first target, even ahead of the government.