Out of the Shadows (4 page)

But before I left town tonight, I needed to make sure that Sarah was safe. I had few personal attachments to Angelwood, and I wanted to make damn well sure that they were all either preserved or destroyed, so as not to leave any loose ends that would always leave me wondering with regret.

I exited my truck and removed the flak jacket from under my hoodie, replacing my red ball cap on my head. I glanced both ways down the street lined with cookie-cutter houses, all of the one-story Ranch-style homes identical except for their exterior paint colors.

The night was too quiet. Even more silent than my house of solitude in the woods. The midnight breeze worsened matters, as if something filthy floated through the air on those wind currents, and it left me on-edge. I patted my holster to reassure myself that my gun was at my side, and I started walking up the driveway.

It was only when I stepped up onto the porch that I noticed the front door was wide open.

I hesitated for only a moment before I released my gun from its holster and took cover against the brick wall to the left of the open door. I took a deep breath, repressing the fear that had begun bubbling to the surface. "She's your 
ex-
wife. Just be done with it!" acquaintances at Gravediggers would say. But what they don’t understand is that she’s not just Sarah Bolton, my ex-wife; she’s the mother of my little girl, and that's a bond that will never be broken, as far as I'm concerned.

I was in a pinch. Normally, I would have a partner that would be able to cover me while I swept through the entrance foyer, but without a second gunman, it seemed a little too reckless. I noticed that there were no signs of forced entry at the hinges or the lock bolt, which meant that the intruder was someone she trusted and for whom she opened the door willingly. Or maybe she flung the door open in a panic and ran out, away from something.

Hell, I didn't have nearly enough information to have any idea why the front door had been left open, and I knew I was wasting time trying to think it through. I would quickly sweep around the back of the house for a safer way in. I stayed low to the ground and stepped down off the porch, headed to the right, using waist-high bushes for cover. I stopped under the first tall window, nearly stretching from floor to ceiling, slowly peeking inside. The lights were off. No signs of movement.

I turned the corner of the house, keeping as close to the brick as possible, noting that in my heightened state of awareness, the grass felt sticky under my shoes. I focused on the chain-link fence ahead, taking care to purposely ignore the high window coming up on my right; it was Annie’s old room. The house’s foundation was raised due to the basement we had decided to add to the plans before the house was built, and as a result, her window was high off the ground, which made it easier for me to ignore and continue toward the fence into the backyard. But something alerted the edge of my vision, and I looked up.

The light in Annie’s room was on.

My breath caught into a lump in my throat. I had to force myself to swallow and keep breathing. I looked around at the surrounding houses and listened. This was no longer my home, to a much larger degree than only one day ago. I felt like I was standing in an alien world where up was down and blue was green.

Moving quickly to the fence, I quietly released the latch and pushed it open just far enough for me to squeeze through. I didn’t bother shutting it behind me. Crouching, I scampered across the lawn, staying close to the house, careful not to activate the motion sensor spotlight I had installed a few years back. No other lights were on in other windows, as far as I could tell.

I hopped up the two concrete steps leading to the double French doors and took cover to the side, slowly peeking through the divided windowpanes. The family room beyond was shrouded in blackness. I softly turned the faux-brass doorknob, but it was locked (as I had hoped it would be). I silently rejoiced when I discovered Sarah still kept a spare key under the potted plant to the left of the steps.

I stealthily entered the family room through the back door, sweeping the darkness with my weapon. Most of the room was just as I remembered it: the fireplace and brown recliner, the ugly plaid-patterned couch made up of shades of burnt orange, the faux-wood paneling on the lower half of the walls, the tattered rust-colored recliner near the TV. But the walls were different; she had painted them a deep burgundy that really suited the space. It felt more homely than before.

I crept toward the long kitchen, taking one step onto the linoleum before halting. I stared at the barstool near the counter to the right, the spot of flooring in front of the sink, the blue-carpeted hallway perpendicular to the kitchen at the other end…

My hands shook, my heart raced, and my eyes slammed shut as the images blasted my brain like it had happened yesterday.

I remembered being on the barstool, terribly drunk, with a lowball glass of whiskey and coke in front of me. Annie screamed. I jumped out of the seat but couldn’t stand. As I fell over onto the floor, I saw the man round the corner, Annie in one arm, a gun in his hand. She bit him, and he dropped her. Sarah emerged from our bedroom and threw her arms around the man’s neck. He elbowed her stomach, forcing her to double over before he spun around quickly and slammed the butt of his gun into her head, knocking her to the floor, unconscious.

I couldn’t do anything. I struggled to stand, but everything I saw was blurry and nauseating. In my whiskey stupor, I managed to raise myself to my knees and mumble something. I saw the intruder point his gun at me. I heard Annie scream “Daddy!” as she ran toward me. Then the gunshot. The man uttered an obscenity, tripped over Sarah’s body, charged down the hallway, and scrambled out the front door.

The urge to vomit had been so strong when things finally came into focus, and I saw my little girl lying on her stomach in a massive pool of her own blood, her face pointed in my direction, her green eyes staring into my soul. It was as if her dead body were able to ask, “Why daddy? Why didn’t you help us? Do you love whiskey more than you love me?!”

Now, as I stood in the kitchen at the location of the end of my daughter’s life, the end of my marriage, and the end of who I had been, something inside me finally shattered. I knew that things needed to change. My life wasn’t over yet, and I had spent the past two years acting as if it were. I figured this was as good a time as any to definitively quit drinking. And maybe, if the world still existed in a week, I could try to get my old job back.

I didn’t risk walking down the length of the kitchen, knowing that there were many creaky spots in the floor, and I wasn’t yet ready to announce my presence. Instead, I went left through the living room, circling around to the bedroom hallway. I saw Annie’s door, closed, with a beam of warm halogen light sneaking out from the base. I placed my ear against it and heard nothing. Slowly, I turned the knob and pushed open the door.

My chest clenched as I saw the yellow carpet and walls, the small twin bed, the stuffed bears, the hanging carousel lamp; all of Annie’s things remained untouched. I could almost hear the echoes of innocent laughter, imagining her sitting on the floor playing with her animals, giving each of them a character to play out in her dramas.

Sarah sat on a folding chair in the center of the room, her back to me.

I kept my gun raised toward the ceiling, ready to spring into action as I asked, “Sarah?”

She didn’t respond.

I saw her torso expanding with breath, so I knew she wasn’t dead. “Sarah, it’s B… it’s Nick.” I almost said “Bear,” but I quickly remembered that she hated that nickname and refused to call me by it. I took a few steps into the room, my gun lowering toward the floor.

Still, she didn’t respond.

As I neared her, I could see that she was trembling. I cautiously stepped around to face her, and she looked up at me, her long brown hair falling into her face, fear and regret in her eyes, her skin pale and sweaty, a strip of cloth tied around her mouth.

I immediately removed the gag as she tried to push me away, tears streaming down her face. “Sarah,” I said. “Are you all right? What happened?!”

She continued shoving me back. “Please, you have to leave. Leave now!”

“What’s going on?!”

“Nick, they’re here!”

I stepped back in shock as her words sunk into my thick skull. Of course. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind before this moment. The open front door. The light in Annie’s room. Sarah sitting here by herself, bound and gagged.

It was a trap.

These people used to be acquaintances in town. They knew I wouldn’t be able to walk away from Angelwood without stopping here first. I thought back to the events at the police station when the newly turned Billy had begun quietly muttering that he had found me, and everyone else had come running as if they’d heard him. Did these
things
communicate telepathically in some way?

I imagined the woman in the group at the police station mutter as I drove away, “Nick Barren has fled the station. Nick Barren is gone. Nick Barren is probably going to his ex-wife’s house. Nick Barren will fall for our lame and simple trap, because he is a stupid drunk.”

If punching myself could be productive, I would have done it.

“Hello, Nick Barren.”

I looked up at the door and saw a cluster of people – maybe ten of them – staring at me with dead eyes and straight lips. I glanced down at Sarah, who looked up into my eyes, crying, an expression of sincere apology on her face. It was only now that I noticed the blood staining the side of her shirt.

She had been bitten, although I was still unsure what that meant exactly.

I raised my weapon toward the threshold, a burning rage smoldering inside like an inferno threatening to explode.

They must have noticed my anger, because three of them spoke in unison, not an ounce of fear in their tone. “Nick Barren, please. We don’t wish to harm you. We wish to help you.”

“You bastards can’t help me,” I seethed.

Now, five of them spoke at once. “Join us willingly. It’s much less painful that way.”

“Did you give Sarah a choice?!” I spat, fighting back tears of anguish.

All of them spoke in an eerie chorus, the men and women forming a dissonant harmony of words: “Those in who we see potential get a choice.”

“Potential for what?” I demanded.

“Join our community, and you will see, Nick Barren.”

I shook with frenzied adrenaline, my gun trained at the face of the main person in the doorway. I exchanged a pained glance with Sarah, and in her eyes I saw the words I knew she could never utter aloud: “I love you.”

I pulled the trigger.

The man whose face I pulverized dropped to the ground in a bloody heap, the rest of them staring at me, expressionless.

“Sorry,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow with my forearm. “I don’t do so well in groups.” I fired the next shot, and the next.

The people-things began trying to push their way into the room, but they had to climb over the bodies of their comrades, and they stumbled. I took them out, one by one, sending smatterings of blood all over the shadowed hallway walls. As Sarah cried from fright, I advanced on them, trying to force my way out of the room. I stepped over their dead bodies as I approached the final two.

My gun
clicked
its empty barrel, and I effortlessly holstered it, grabbing the neck of the woman in front of me and twisting it until I heard a sickening
crack
. I tossed her body to the ground as I kicked the final man backward, sending him into the closet doors in the hall, knocking them off their sliding tracks on the floor. While he was disoriented, I quickly reloaded my P228 and fired one quick shot into his forehead, a streak of blood smearing down the faux-wood door as he slumped to the carpet.

I marched into the entrance foyer toward the front door, getting ready to slam it shut when I saw a mob of thirty people charging up the driveway toward me, having no doubt heard the telepathic cries of their fellow “community members.” I panicked only briefly before slamming the door and solidly bolting it, pushing the nearby hutch in front of it as they began pounding and rattling the doorknob, unable to bust through the makeshift barricade.

I ran to the back French doors through which I had entered the house, knowing that those wouldn’t hold them back for long, since the majority of the surface area was made up of tiny windowpanes. They would easily break through, but at least this would buy me a short while to think. I bolted the door and headed back into Annie’s bedroom.

Once inside, I promptly shut the door and locked it, pulling the bed away from the wall and resting it up against the only entrance into the room. I took a deep breath and sighed, hearing the banging of the angry mob outside the house. Then I remembered:

The window.

Although it was high off the ground, one could feasibly reach it if given a boost. I quickly pushed a bookcase in front of it to make any entry attempts more difficult.

Finally, I turned my attention toward Sarah, who was slumped in the folding chair, pale, sweaty, and panting. I lifted her into my arms, kicking the seat away and lowering her comfortably to the carpet. I snatched the pillow from the bed and placed it delicately under her head, brushing strands of hair from her face.

I looked down into her eyes and smiled, my brain coming up with no words sufficient for the moment. Eventually, I said, “So, I quit drinking today.”

She smiled but didn’t respond.

My eyes gravitated toward the wound in her side, blood soaking through her shirt. “When were you bitten?”

She inhaled with a wheeze and responded, “Earlier today. I was downtown when the chaos started, and someone bit me. I pushed him away, got in my car, and raced home. I tried to bandage it, but it started stinging around the edges, and it wouldn’t stop.” Her face contorted with pain as she tried to hold back her emotions.

It was tearing me apart inside to see her like this, lying on the ground, bleeding, looking at me. It reminded me of Annie.

She coughed deeply, in a way that sounded terribly unhealthy. “My doorbell rang an hour ago, and it was Sherry from next door. So I let her in and…” Sobs wracked her body now, but she didn’t need to finish her sentence. I understood.