The Hole (18 page)

Hope barked at them from the truck’s cab, but they left him inside until they’d picked through their supplies and chosen a dinner of canned beats, tuna fish, and a brick of hard cheddar. Then, the dog in tow, they opened the door to 112 and went inside.

The room, like the office, was clean. The only sign of prior occupancy was the comforter on the bed, which had been pushed down like someone had kicked it away upon waking up.

“That’s creepy,” Evajean said.

Elliot flipped the light switch but the room stayed dark. “Electricity’s out.”

“Yeah,” Evajean said. She pulled the curtains wide, letting in what remained of the day’s light. “I’m going to take Hope out,” she said.

“Be careful.”

While she was gone, Elliot opened the cans and spooned out portions on a set of plates they’d taken from one of the homes in Nahom. He cut the cheese into slices and arrayed them next to the tuna fish and beets.

When Evajean came back, they ate, enjoying the meal more for the peaceful quiet of the surroundings than for the taste of the preserved food.

The dog had a can of tuna fish as well, and enjoyed it immensely.

After they’d eaten and prepared for bed as best they could-Evajean complaining about the lack of running water-they each took one of the two twins, crawled under the covers against the September chill, and tried to go to sleep.

But it didn’t happen, not immediately. Elliot’s mind just couldn’t shut down. It kept racing around what’d happened in the early hours of the morning, the
display
Evajean had put on in the circle.

“You’re thinking about it,” she said, startling him.

“Yeah.” His stared at the ceiling. “I am.” He didn’t think he was tossing or making any noise, but he apologized anyway. “I’m sorry, am I keeping you up?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, it’s not you. It’s just, I can’t sleep either. Because I’m thinking about it, too.”

“You don’t remember it.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t. But I know what you told me and there’s this feeling in the back of my head, like I could remember if I really wanted to. Thing is, I don’t. What you told me is enough. It’s plenty. Remembering it, if what you said is true-and I believe you, it’s not that-but if what you told me is true, it’d all be too much, you know?”

“Yes,” Elliot said.

He heard her roll over. The dog jumped off her bed then immediately back on.

“But I want to know if it’s going to happen again,” she said.

Elliot was quiet.

“I want to know if I’m going to go crazy and hurt someone. Hurt you.”

“I won’t let you,” he said.

“Go crazy?”

“That, or hurt anyone. I won’t let it happen.”

“You couldn’t stop it before,” Evajean said. “When I killed all those people.”

Elliot rolled onto his side to face her bed. He still couldn’t see her well in the dark, just a shape, but he knew she was looking at him, too. “We don’t know what happened, back there. You might not have killed them. We don’t know. It could’ve been that thing. The box.”

Evajean had taken it when them, in the pocket of her jacket. Elliot didn’t know where it was now but he bet it was still close by.

He heard her sigh. “Elliot, I’m just scared. That’s all. I’m scared. It’s like things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be.” He started to respond but she cut him off. “I’m not talking about everyone being dead, being gone. What I mean is there’s things happening that don’t make any sense. Like what we saw in the cave, those shapes around Jeffry and everyone else. And what you say happened after we escaped. It’s not natural, Elliot. It’s not what we know how to, I guess, how to make
sense
of.”

“I know,” Elliot said.

“What do you think it is?” she asked.

“I’ve been trying to figure that out. And I don’t have any answers, not even good guesses. But I have questions and I’ve been thinking, if we have enough questions and they’re all related, they’re all good questions, then maybe they’ll fit together and we’ll have to get some answers. It’s kind of like how you can solve a crossword by seeing how all the blanks line up.”

“Have you solved any of it?”

“No. But there’s- I don’t know if this makes any sense, but there’s something it’s like I’m feeling around the edges of. I can’t see it and can’t see all the edges, but it’s there. I know it’s there. That’s what I’ve been thinking about. What I thought about a whole lot today.”

“What is it?”

Elliot pushed himself up and sat against the headboard. It was odd talking like this, without a light, without being able to see each other, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“Remember when I told you you said something about a waypoint?” he said. “When you were talking to the crazies?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Well, that’s what really got me thinking. Because it seems like we’ve run into too many coincidences. Too many times where nothing should have happened, but it did. Like us being across the street from each other. How much of Charlottesville did we drive through? How much had we each seen before we even met, when you came over for the steak?”

“A lot, I suppose.”

“A lot. Right. Not most of it, but a good portion. And there was no one else, Evajean. Nobody. We were it. Which is fine. In and of itself, it’s fine, because if the sickness killed almost everybody, that still means it didn’t kill somebody. But the thing is, why did two lucky somebodies have to live right across the street from each other?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded tired, but Elliot was excited now and so kept going.

“I don’t know, either. But the chances aren’t good. And it doesn’t end there. We found each other, sure, and then we found that crazy in Wal-Mart. She’s explainable because she was locked in there and we didn’t check other houses, other buildings, so there might’ve been more people like her. What really gets me, though, is the kid in the road. The one we almost hit and then went down the hill. Because it was hitting him that wrecked the truck and that’s what got us to Nahom. What you called the ‘waypoint.’ Think about it, Evajean. How big are the Appalachian mountains in Virginia. Big. And a town of a hundred people? Stuck somewhere in all that forest? Really, what are the chance’s we’d find
that
? That we’d wreck the truck close enough to it that we both found it?”

“It’s not likely, Elliot.” Her voice was still sleepy. “What I don’t get…” She trailed off, quite for a moment, then she came back. “It’s just, all the stuff that happened to me there-to
us
there-is so, I don’t know, crazy, and what’s the point of worrying about the town? We found it. I want to know what happened there.”

“Evajean, it’s all related,” Elliot said. “I think there’s something going on and I think we’re part of it. You’re part of it for sure because of what happened and because of that box, but I’m in it, too. You know what I think? What I really think? I think we were
meant
to find Nahom.”

“Elliot-”

“No- No, hear me out. You said it yourself, in that circle. You said they need to leave this waypoint. Waypoints, Evajean, they’re planned. It’s not like you wander around for a while, when you’re out hiking, and you don’t know where you’re going, and then you stop and say, ‘Hey, here’s the waypoint.’ No, you make note of your waypoints before you head out. I think our trip was planned and I think Nahom was part of it.”

“Who planned it?” she asked, but her voice was faint and Elliot knew she was drifting off, that she wasn’t paying all that much attention anymore.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the thing I’m feeling around the edges of. If I could figure that out, if I knew who planned it, then I bet we’d have all the answers we need. Not just about why we ended up in Nahom or why us two neighbors survived when everyone else died. We’d know all of it. And-and this is just a guess but all of this is just guesses, anyway-I’d be willing to bet everything I have, everything in that truck out there, that when we do find it out, the hole will be part of it.”

Evajean coughed softly and rolled over. She’d fallen asleep. Elliot lay awake for another hour, mulling the thoughts over and failing to make any more sense of it.

When he woke up, it was still dark. But not entirely. From outside, through the closed curtains, dim lights moved.

Elliot jumped up and shook Evajean. The dog barked once and stretched. “Evajean. Wake up. I think someone’s outside.”

“Wha-” She blinked rapidly.

“There’s someone out there. Look.”

Then she did come awake. “What is that?” she asked, her voice tense.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Stay here.” He crept around the bed and over to the windows. Staying low, he peaked out over the sill. People were gathered outside, some with flashlights, and these caused the shifting illumination on the curtains. He couldn’t tell how many they were but the crowd was at least thirty strong. They stood in wide arc across the parking lot, facing in at the hotel room. And from the way they stared forward and how their mouths moved as the flashlights they waved passed across their faces, he knew they were the crazies.

“Shit,” he said and sat down, his back against the thin strip of wall under the window.

“Who’s out there?” Evajean said.

“It’s them,” he said. “They found us.”

“Who? Jeffry?”

“No. Not Jeffry. It’s the crazies.”

The light through the curtains was bright enough that he was able to see her sit up straight and pull the blankets close.

“How’d they find us?” she said. Her voice was tight, a whisper. “Is it the same ones? From back-”

“I don’t think so. It’s dark, but I didn’t recognize any. But they’re the crazies, I’m sure of that.”

“What are we going to do? Are they by the truck?”

Elliot looked out again. “Kind of,” he said. “They’re surrounding us and they’re close enough to the truck.”

“We’re trapped.”

“Maybe,” he said, working his way back over toward the beds. “But what are they waiting for? They’re just standing out there.”

“They’re not trying to get in?”

“They’re just standing there. Looking at our room.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Did we bring the guns in?”

“No,” Evajean said.

“We left them in the truck?”

“I think so.”

“God dammit!” He pulled open the little cabinet built into the nightstand, the doors smacking against the bed frames, and felt around inside. All he got was a bible and a plasticky folder, probably of local ads and emergency contact numbers. Elliot stood up.

“What are you looking for?” Evajean asked, still sitting with the blanket held held up by her neck.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something.”

“What?”

“
Something.
Evajean, we’re going to have to fight. They’re not going to leave us alone.”

“I have the box,” she said.

He stopped, and turned back to look at her. He couldn’t see her face, not even in the crazies’ lights, but he knew if he could, she’d look sick and worried. It was in her voice.

“I could use it,” she said.

“Do you know how?”

There was a moment of silence and then she said, “No.”

“Then we can’t use it.”

“I didn’t know how before. Back in Nahom, I didn’t know how to use it then.”

“Can you do it again?”

She put down the blanket and twisted, dropping her feet to the ground. “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Elliot said. “Okay, then we can’t count on it. You can try, but we have to have another way, too. Is there a window back there? In the bathroom? We could climb out.”

He jogged around the foot of the bed and into the tiny bathroom. With his body in the doorway, however, the light from the crazies was blocked entirely and he couldn’t see any more than vague shapes. He ducked down, trying to let some of it in, trying to let it reflect off glass.

It did. Over the sink, to the left of the mirror and nearly six feet up the wall was a small window, a foot and a half square. He felt along it for bars and found none, just two wooden strips, perpendicular, dividing it into quarters.

“They’re not doing anything,” Evajean said, and he turned back to see her out of bed and crouched on the floor below the room’s front window. She had her arms out, elbows on the sill, chin on her hands.

“Evajean, get down,” he said, and she lowered herself to the carpet, letting the curtains fall closed. “There’s another window back here,” he continued.

“Can we get out?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Then, “I don’t think so. I think it’s too small.”

“For you? Or too small for me, too?”

“Both,” he said. “For me, definitely. For you, I don’t know. Maybe.”

She came to him, staying low and when she was in the bathroom he guided her to the window. She measured it with her hands and said, “I can try. I think I might fit.”

“And then what? When you get out?”

She stared at him. “I have no idea,” she said.

They heard the dog yawn from the bed and Elliot leaned against the sink. “We might have to use the box,” he said.

“But-”

“What else can we do, Evajean? I don’t think they’re going to leave.”

“They might.”

He left that unchallenged.

“They’re not coming in,” she said. “They’re just standing there. Maybe they’ll go away when it gets light out.”

Elliot didn’t think the chance of that were good. The crazies had been stubborn in their pursuit of him before and there wasn’t any reason for them to change now. Yes, the woman in red didn’t appear to be leading them this time, but crazies were crazies. Sitting around in the hotel room, hoping they’d get board and wander off, wasn’t a plan he was willing to risk.

“Try the box,” he said. “Go out near the window, hold it up like before, and, I guess, concentrate. You did it once. Concentrate on making them leave or killing them.”

Evajean went back into the main room. Elliot stayed in the bathroom, watching her from the doorway. She picked up her jacket from the floor and pulled the golden box out of the pocket. The box reflected the light from the crazies, glints flashing on Evajean’s face. She turned it over in her hands, staring at it. He wanted to tell her to do something now, to hold it up and just try, because that was all there was left for them to do. But he didn’t. He couldn’t force her.