The feeling of spiders crawling across my skin. Everything about the situation whispering Wrong. Like a cold breath across the back of my neck.
“Could be an electrical surge,” he said. “Like you said before. Rolling blackouts or something…” He was grasping for anything—nails and skin on metal and me—just like when he fell.
“For cell phones, too?” I asked.
He stepped back from the window, pressed his lips together, and he didn’t answer. He was doing the same thing I was—trying to find a reasonable explanation, to tamp down the paranoia, or the fear, but one of us had to say it. One of us had to face it.
“Or,” I said slowly, instinctively grabbing his arm, pulling him back from the window, “something’s blocking our calls.”
Something. Someone.
I hadn’t made a decision, and now it was too late. My fault. My inaction. And now we both had to pay for it.
Our eyes locked, his mouth slightly open. “You saw someone out there?” he asked. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” I said, and I felt acid rising in the back of my throat.
He quickly scanned the walls, the doors, the windows, jerked the curtains closed and backed toward the center of the house, pulling me with him. Even in the dark, I could tell he was closing his eyes. “This place is a fortress,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
This place was not a fortress. It was built to withstand a strong storm—to provide for us if we couldn’t reach the outside world for a week or two. It was built to protect us from intruders—until help could arrive. It was designed to alert, to alarm, to tell us to call for help, or to run. None of which were options at the moment.
“There are cameras in my mom’s office,” I said. His arm brushed against mine, and our fingers linked together as we made our way through the darkened hall.
“It could be nothing,” he said. “It could be anything.” He meant it to be reassuring, but his hand was cold and his grip was tight, and I wondered, once more, whether he was talking to himself.
“Ryan, we need help,” I said. Just to make sure he understood—this house was not a fortress.
—
The blinds in Mom’s office were slanted open, and I reached up to close them before turning on the screens for the security cameras around the property. I didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. I wanted to see without being seen. It felt like the upper hand, even if we were, at the moment, trapped.
I watched the screens flicker to life as Ryan stood beside me. The light reflected off the pictures and the framed artwork lining the walls, but everything seemed colorless and dull. The screens were black-and-white, grainy and pixelated, and I could only see the area illuminated by the outside lights—like a stark, oval orb. The gates remained closed.
Fortress, I told myself, trying to make it so.
“I still don’t see anything. Tell me exactly what you saw,” he said.
I closed my eyes, replaying it. “I saw a shadow out front, and then it was gone.” I shivered. “And when I turned on the back lights, I saw a shadow dive to stay hidden.”
He looked over his shoulder, at the windows closed up tight. “So it could just be neighborhood kids or something,” he said. But he pressed his lips together, and he didn’t look at me when he said it.
I said nothing in response.
Ryan was watching the video feeds on the wall above us, frowning. He must’ve been able to feel all the pieces crushing in on us, each one more wrong than the last. My mother gone, the phone line out, our cell phones blocked, a shadow out back. He could explain away each on its own, but all together? No, he couldn’t. And he knew it.
He turned to face me, and he placed his hands around my shoulders, as if this alone could keep me safe. “They’ll leave,” he said. “They’ll realize we’re here, and that we see them, and they’ll leave. People don’t want to rob a house with people home, Kelsey.”
As if we could wait it out and be fine. I rested my forehead against Ryan’s chest for one heartbeat, two, before I pulled myself together.
“In the basement,” I said, pulling back. “We have everything down there, in case of emergency. There has to be a way to make a call.”
In the safe room, we had anything we might need, in any possible emergency situation—and now I needed them.
—
We kept the lights off.
I felt my way through the dark hallway, stumbling around the corners, until I found the basement door.
There was nothing. No source of light. No ambient glare from the streetlights far away or the moonlight through the windows. I didn’t know the way by heart in the common rooms, not the way I knew the steps from my bedroom light switch to my bed, or the way I could count the paces as I ran down the hall to my mom’s room when I was little and prone to nightmares that I could never remember.
She’d curl her body around mine, and I knew nothing could happen to me as long as she was there.
The dark was not a fear of mine. The dark was my home. I could hide inside it, with the four walls of my bedroom keeping me safe, and go still—and nothing could touch me.
But even that wasn’t true. This house was not made of impenetrable steel. It never occurred to me we might not be safe enough here, with the bars and the alarm and the reinforced locks and the grates over the windows. But take away our phones, cut the alarm, and we were on our own. It was all just a matter of time.
Ryan trailed behind me, a hand on my shoulder, another on my waist, following my lead until I eased the basement door shut behind us and flipped on the overhead bulbs, which seemed to dance in the dark.
We bumped up against boxes and each other as we raced through the stacks, even in the light, on the way to the safe room. I didn’t bother hiding the code from Ryan this time: 23-12-37, and we were in. The security feeds flickered to life as the power turned on. But all I could see were dark, stationary objects in the orbs of light. The black iron fence, lit up and circling the house in a pattern I knew by heart.
There were plastic boxes lining the shelves from floor to ceiling on the three remaining walls. Flashlights with batteries and other light sources, boxed food, blankets and bottles of water. I tried to remember what she’d said about the radio—something about communication, even without electricity, even without phones. She’d truly prepared for everything.
I pulled the boxes down, one at a time, but Ryan stayed outside the door. “You can come in,” I said, pulling down the clear tubs that looked like they held electronics.
“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to.”
I had asked him to turn around earlier. I had wanted to keep this from him. The darker parts of my life, the scarier parts. The part of me that was my blood. I had wanted to be anyone other than who I was. But there was no hiding anymore.
“Here,” I said, sliding one of the containers across the floor, closer to him. I opened the top, but Ryan was looking past it—past me—his face scrunched up in confusion. “Do you guys have a safe room inside a safe room or something?”
“Huh?” I dropped the flashlights I’d grabbed from the top of the box. Turned around. Saw what Ryan was talking about. The corner of the blue rug was folded up, caught on the corner of the crate, and in the floor was another compartment. A small square, completely flat, like a large bathroom tile, but with a tiny hole the size of my finger, to pull it up.
“Oh.” I removed the square tile and leaned it against the back wall.
It wasn’t deep—just the size of a safe, everything resting on a square piece of wood below. Inside were zippered, opaque pouches. I unzipped the first, and knew immediately why it was hidden. Cash. Large stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills bound together with rubber bands.
“Whoa,” Ryan said.
“Oh,” I repeated.