KERRI: Nate! NATE!
Andy took a split second to reassess. Six wheezers were still stuck in the doorway, trying to chew one another’s arms out of the way. The room was covered in two layers of writhing mutilated aliens and black gore. It took a while to make sure no human corpses lay among them. She skipped over the dead bodies toward the burst dormer window.
He wasn’t down on the ground. Kerri spotted him first, at the end of the west wing, hanging off the roof.
Both girls called him.
“Don’t listen!” Peter shouted into his ear. “Just go!”
Nate clung to the ivy on the walls, grabbed a thick trunk and slid down along it, the gnarls and severed twigs tearing the skin off his palms. The girls saw him crash-land on top of the conservatory roof, roll off it, and hit the ground somewhere in the shrubs.
Kerri stopped breathing for a second, clutching Andy’s arm, until she saw him stand back up. Then there was an ephemeral relief, before her eyes convinced her brain that Nate was actually running toward the dock.
“Nate?! What are you doing?!”
They saw him jump into the motorboat, then stop by the controls and touch his pockets. Kerri had the ignition keys.
“Fuck it,” Peter said, already aboard the rowboat. “Come on!”
“Nate, don’t!” Kerri yelled from the window, watching Nate switching boats, untying the rope, and taking the oars. “Nate!”
Andy pulled Kerri inside a second before a wheezer that had crept up the fa?ade onto the roof slashed her face off. It jumped into the room with them, jaws open at a thylacine angle, in the same second Kerri pulled her knife out and thrust it upward into its abdomen. It landed half dead, its guts lost in flight.
“Out!” cried Andy, pulling her away from the window and toward one of the new doorways the wheezers had been so kind to open for them.
A wheezer cut them off from the gap inside the hollow wall. Tim viciously pounced at it, throwing it down and biting at its neck as the thing tried to shake him off.
“This way!” said Andy, pulling Kerri to the opposite hole, loading shells into her rifle as she ran. They were relying on moonlight now, but Andy somehow recognized the next room.
A stampede of six-limbed monsters almost knocked the door off its hinges.
“We’re trapped!”
“No,” Andy replied. “This is where you disappeared.”
“What?”
“This is the room where you fell into a trap! Where was it?”
“I…I was standing over there and I…pulled that lamp!”
Andy grabbed Kerri by the waist, stood on the corner, and pulled a candleholder on the wall. It came right off into her hand.
Right at that moment, the door came down, along with two wheezers stomped by the rest of the hollering pack.
ANDY: Aw, fuck this.
She shot at the floor. The trapdoor they were standing on crumbled under their feet, dropping them inside a hollow wall to land on a slide, Andy clutching Kerri all the way down and smothering a scream while orange hair went weee along the way, all through the first floor and down to the basement.
A single, bile-coughing wheezer was standing in the coal room where they arrived, its back turned to the end of the slide. It heard the girls crash-landing into the coal pile behind, scrambled to face them, and had its head blown into subatomic matter, thus starting and ending its overall contribution to the story in one paragraph.
Kerri clambered on the coal pile, tried to climb back up the ramp.
“We forgot Tim!”
“He’s fine, come with me!”
“No! We need Tim!”
Andy had to pull her out of the ancient coal room and into the basement proper, frenzied screams of the besiegers booming all around them as they raced through the mansion’s foundations. Under the paroxysm of their flashlights she caught broken glimpses of shadows scuttling around corners, passageways into blackness, a heavy door that seemed secure enough.
She opened it and yanked Kerri inside with her and pulled it shut behind them, and only when the door latched did she recognize the room. She whirled around and tried the door again: locked.
“Oh fuck.”
“This is the dungeon!” Kerri cried, grabbing her own skull. “This is the same fucking dungeon!”
“I know,” Andy panted, striking a match, about to gouge her eyes out for that mistake. “But they can’t reach us here!”
“They can reach Nate! And Tim!”
“Nate’s got a better chance out there, and Tim can hide!”
“Until when?! Who’s gonna let us out this time?!”
“Kerri, please, calm down!”
“They’re outside! They’re scratching the walls!”
“I know!”
“We are going to die!”
“Kerri, keep it together, please!”
They were holding each other’s wrists now, Andy’s imploring hand feeling Kerri’s frantic pulse and failing to calm it for what felt like a frozen minute, until she had to drop the match burned down to her fingertips. Darkness prevailed.
The ruckus outside was subsiding.
Andy searched her pockets. Ten minutes into the war, her once perfectly sorted equipment was in shambles. She found a couple of glowsticks somewhere, snapped one, and examined the wide, empty, preposterously jail-like cellar. A dungeon, for all intents.
Kerri had retreated to the back of the room. Her eyes were barren. Her hair had died.
“We should’ve never come here,” she murmured.
“No, Kerri, you said we had to come, and you were right. We gotta stop him from gassing Blyton Hills, remember?”
“We should’ve never come to Blyton Hills.”
“We had to come.”
“We didn’t! I was better out there!”
“None of us were better out there; we were a disaster!”
“I was safe!” Kerri yelled, yielding to tears. “I was better on my own, three thousand miles from here, and you dragged me here again to die!”
“What? That’s not true!”
“This is your fucking fault!”
“Kerri, I would never put you in harm’s way; I love you!”
“You don’t love me! If you loved me so much, why did you fucking leave in the first place?!”
Andy stopped halfway to her, the shock wave of those words almost blasting her off her feet. The anger in Kerri’s eyes hurt to watch.
“If you loved me so much, why were you just waiting till you turned sixteen to grab a backpack and leave?! Shit, you could’ve come to Portland with me! We could’ve been together! But you just hopped on a train to nowhere to be the lone rider and you left me alone! (Voice shattering.) I was terrified! My life was spiraling out of control! I needed you, for fuck’s sake, I needed you then! And I had to wait for your fucking postcards from Alaska whenever you remembered I exist!”
She bent, exhausted, vocal cords burning, brushing her lifeless hair apart.
“You don’t love me. You left me.”
She sobbed like a gentle rain after the storm. She retreated back to her corner and slid down to the floor.
“You hate me,” the rain said.