But Ryan didn’t pull back from the window. “Ryan,” I said. Fifty-one, fifty…
I put my arms around his waist and tugged him back. “Ryan.” I knew how this could happen—how the fear could paralyze you if you let it. I’d sat at the kitchen table, immobilized, just moments earlier—and he’d been the one to pull me out of it. Forty-three, forty-two…
I gripped him tighter. “We have to go,” I said. I felt his muscles trembling, his body on edge.
He spun around, the curtains dropping in a wave behind him. “Go,” he said, pushing me ahead of him. “Go, go, go.”
I ran. My hands brushed the furniture and the walls, my fingers finding the corners and the doorway. I turned the flashlight on once we were back within the basement.
Thirty-one, thirty, twenty-nine…I stood beside the alarm panel, and I waited.
The waiting was agony. Seconds, stretching out. Like Ryan in the car, after I’d seen the emptiness below us. Waiting for him to pull us up to safety. Waiting, and then falling…
Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…
I heard something click through the basement walls. Something hum. A motor revving, winding up—the generator underground, coming to life. My body uncoiling with relief.
The basement lights flickered once with the surge before turning back off, and the freezer in the corner kicked in with a whoosh. I hit the reset button, heard the alarm beep once—Ready—and hit the code to arm it. I tripped over the open boxes on the way to the safe room, turned the video feed back on, and stared at the black-and-white images. The gates were closed.
But had someone gotten in when we hadn’t been looking?
“Why are the lights still out?” Ryan asked. They weren’t on in the basement, and they weren’t on in the yard any longer. The screen was mostly just a dark gray of shadows on shadows.
“The generator can’t power the whole house indefinitely. There are gasoline containers in the front gate booth, but…it’s still only connected to the essentials.”
“What are the essentials?” Ryan asked, because it was obvious that our idea of essential was probably not the same as his.
“Refrigerator, freezer, heat, and surveillance,” I said.
“There,” said Ryan, pointing at the screen. A flash of light at the front gate. Outside the front gate. His finger was shaking, and he pulled it back, balled his hands into fists, like he was embarrassed by it.
Suddenly, on the back monitor, another flash of light swung in an arc, like a flashlight was rolling across the ground. It came to rest at the metal gate, illuminating a second shadow. He was using the light.
He was down low, near the ground. And he was digging.
My eyes kept darting from screen to screen—front gate, back gate, light to light. There were two people.
“They know we’re in here,” Ryan said. “And they don’t care.”
The outside lights I’d turned on, his car out front—yes, they knew.
He gritted his teeth. “Open the door.”
“What?” I asked, wheeling on him. We’d both been staring at the screen, watching and waiting.
“The front door. Set off the alarm.”
“It’s not connected to the police,” I said. It was a warning for us to get in the safe room and figure out what was happening first, before calling for help. My mother thought it wasn’t safe to be on the police radar for a false alarm, not with our living situation so precarious. All it would take was a nudge and we might fall. Besides, right now without the phone lines, there was no way for the alarm system to call out, even if it had been connected.
“Yeah, but it’ll be loud. How close are the neighbors?”
Not that close, I thought. But if Annika had gotten back home…would she hear a high-pitched alarm? Would she try calling me, and then call the police? Or would she think this was just another odd thing about my life here?
“The friend I borrowed the car from,” I said. “She might hear.”
He held out his hand, and I took it, and I thought how ridiculous it was to be nervous of something like this in another circumstance, like before math class, earlier today. Now I held on to it and hoped it grounded me enough to keep me thinking, to keep me safe.
I followed him back up the stairs and went for the front door.
Ryan peered out the front window. His car was somewhere out there, around the bend, parked outside the gate on the side of the road. He glanced at me, and back to the gate, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.
If both people were at the back gate, could we make it?
Could we get through the gates undetected, start up his car, and make a run for it, leaving the abandoned house to them while we went for help? Or would they follow, drive us off the road before we could call for help—
My breath started coming too fast, and I steadied myself against the wall.
“We should’ve left, the second we thought something was wrong,” Ryan said. He balled up his fists again. “That’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s what I’m trained to do.” I felt the tension leeching from his body, filling up the room.
Really he must’ve been thinking, I should’ve stayed at the ceremony. I should’ve gone back with Emma and Holly and that other girl. I should’ve decided to call the police for myself, before we heard the car.
Really he must’ve been thinking, My life is in danger again, because of you.
I stared at the windows, at the doors, at the black iron gates, and I saw them all through his eyes. They were not his protection, like they were for me. He was nothing more than trapped here. With me. For no reason.
Hanging from the car, tumbling past me, tethered by a rope—his fate tied to mine.
I had to get him out of here.
“What’s that guy even doing out front?” he continued. “Why not help the other one, out back. It’s like…” He swallowed. Shook his head. Changed his mind.
“Are you ready?” I asked, before he could give voice to the thing I realized too: It’s like they’re watching for us. Making sure we don’t leave.
“Okay,” Ryan said. “Yes. Open the door.”
I flipped the lock and put my hand on the knob. Paused. This house will keep us safe.
No. We weren’t safe. We were trapped.
I turned the knob and the front door cracked open, a cold gust of air pushing through.
I listened to the warning beep, and then, ten seconds later, the alarm started flashing. The light from the display flashed red, over and over, and there was a low, periodic buzz coming from the panel.
That’s it?
It wasn’t loud enough. It was only enough for us in this house—to wake us, or warn us. My alarm clock was more obnoxious than this.
It was only a warning—a call to action. But just for us.
And now I was wondering how safe an alarm truly kept us if it didn’t call for help.
—
Ryan leaned into the door, shutting it, turning the locks, like he’d done it a thousand times before. “Turn it off,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
The buzzing of the alarm kept sounding, and we had to talk too loudly. “I don’t think anyone can hear that,” Ryan said.
But if I turned it off, it felt like we were doing nothing. “If someone drives by, they might hear it. Maybe someone out for a walk. I don’t know, it’s something, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “I can’t think.”
“Do you have a car alarm? Where are your keys? Do you have a panic button?”
“My car doesn’t even have doors sometimes—it definitely doesn’t have an alarm.” He hit his palm against the door. “What do they want?”
I couldn’t think, like he said, with the buzzing of the alarm. I couldn’t concentrate.
Useless. Everything in this house was useless.
It couldn’t save us. Only we could do that now.
My fingers shook as I entered the alarm code. Then silence…and something more. The sound of metal on metal—something happening in the backyard.