Page 11 of Dead By Dusk

“Any news?” I ask as I approach them and they both go silent. Nate shakes his head then looks back up the stairs, and I follow their eyesight. There’s nothing I can really see up there, and Iwonder if it wasn’t what theysawthat got their attention, but the fact that theyhaven’tseen anything. That none of us have heard any sound come from up there in a while. I try to take a step up when Nate grabs my arm. I look into his eyes and they hold a warning. He brings his pointer finger to his mouth as a sign for me to be silent. He then holds out his palm, indicating I should wait. So I do. I wait, and I listen.

After only a minute, I decided that I’m done waiting for whatever they think is going to happen when I hear it. The sound of a brief scream before there’s a soft thud against the outside of the house. It’s at this point that Nate loses all sense of patience and darts upstairs. While I’m close to follow him, I notice that only the two of us are bothered. Looking back, I see the other man still standing at the bottom of the stairs with a pensive look on his face before he backs away from the stairs and walks out of eyesight. I continue my trek up in time to see Nate storm out of the bathroom, and for the first time, he seems like he isn’t composed. There’s anger in his eyes, but it’s not the only thing I see there when he hits the palm of his hand against the doorframe. Other than that, though, he doesn’t do anything else to betray how he might be feeling.

“They left us,” he mutters. I can’t help but cock my head to the side in confusion. He must sense the question dancing in the back of my mind when he finally looks back at me and just lets out a long, drawn out sigh. “The two women that were here, they left us. I saw them right before they made it into the forest, and there’s definitely more than one dead body out there now. There’s not supposed to be that many.”

I am about to question what he means by that when he stands up straighter and walks towards the only door still closed up here and tries to open it. It doesn’t budge. It’s obviously a door. It has all the makings of one, and the slight discolorationon different parts of the knob indicate that it had been used quite frequently at one point or another, but it doesn’t move.

There’s no give.

“She said it wouldn’t work, I just figured it might be stuck. That she didn’t push hard enough maybe, but now I see what she was saying. It doesn’t seem like it’ll open.” I just look at him with furrowed brows.

“You keep saying ‘she’ but you don’t mention a name. For either of them,” I point out, and he just looks at me for a brief second before shaking his head and stalking back off to the stairs. “Why won’t you just say their names? If we’re going to be looking for them, shouldn’t we know them?” I ask, knowing that I’m right but ready for him to brush off the question.

To my surprise, he doesn’t. He just looks me dead in the eyes and says, “It doesn’t matter right now. They left. We’ll find them or we won’t.” Then proceeds down the stairs. For what? I’m not sure, but I don’t care to find out.

Rather than follow him, I decide to investigate each of the rooms on my own, though there’s not much to see in any of them. They’re mostly empty with the exception of curtains and a mattress sitting in the middle of the floor in one of the rooms. But there’s nothing else to be found anywhere.

Until I make it to the end of the hall.

Once I enter the bathroom, I see it. The open window, the body with multiple spikes shooting through it and his ashen face staring at me. His eyes are still open. Wide. A look of surprise and pure agony forever etched onto his face.

It isn’t until several minutes later that I realize I’m still staring at the lifeless man in front of me with curiosity, when the other two men return. Nate looks indifferent as he steps toward the window and places his hand on my shoulder. The contact sends a wave of apprehension rolling through my body, and I pull away from the icy feeling. He doesn’t seem to have the samereaction nor notice mine. Instead, he steps into the spot where I was standing and leans out of the window, gaze swinging from left to right before he brings his body back into the house and studies both of us.

“Alright, I’m going down first. I don’t know what happened here but it doesn’t look good out there, so I expect that something can and will happen. That means, when we get down there, we move. We don’t stop and look around. We head for the forest. It’s our best bet of survival if there’s something or someone after us. Understood?”

I don’t know when he was appointed leader, and even though I don’t want to listen to him, it’s not a bad plan, and I don’t want to be in charge of anyone. Not when I’m thinking about tan legs, staring into a sea of green, and listening to the way my name rolls off her tongue like venom laced honey. It sounds so poisonously sweet.

So instead, I watch as the man next to me gives a curt nod. I mirror the motion, also shrugging—indifferent despite the oddness of our situation. Nate gives us another once-over before taking a seat on the windowsill, giving us one last look before swinging both legs over and onto the roof. His steps are taken with meticulous calculation. They’re careful, measured even. Not once does he stumble as he moves around the body, sits on the ledge and carefully adjusts his grip, before he begins his descent. Then he disappears. The two of us copy the same movements, though, it isn’t until we all hit the ground that I take a good look around and question once again what Nate meant when he said there were multiple bodies.

Too many bodies.

That’s what he said, though standing here, I only see one. A woman with wild hair, wide, frantic eyes, and a dagger through her back.

6

Always: Silene

We’ve barely just begun running again, but this time at a slower pace than we were before. I had given her a couple minutes of walking to allow her a brief moment to continue catching her breath, but we need to keep going. Thankful as I was to have a minute, we can’t waste any more time this close to the border of the forest when the others are bound to have already discovered the fact that we’re both gone. Not when there’s an unsettling air surrounding us with every step that we take, the silence cloaking the sinister intentions of those around us, only disturbed by the snapping of twigs with every few steps.

“Si,” Carmen says, breaking the silence, and I slightly look over my shoulder while keeping my pace steady.

“No.” I say, keeping my response short as to keep the journey silent.

Anything other than a warning can wait for a break, and there seems to be nothing urgent happening at the moment,and by the deep breaths she’s releasing already, she should keep talking to a minimum and not waste more of her energy.

“You don’t”—breath—“even”—breath—“know what”—breath—“I was going to”—breath—“say.”

I stop running for the sake of her well being, and turn around in time to see her almost crash into me. “You can hardly breathe as it is. Wasting any more breath on conversation is not going to help you right now. We also don’t know how many people are out here, and conversing through the entire journey does nothing but give away our location to anyone trying to find us. I do not need to know what you were going to say, unless it is to tell me you see someone else out here.”

She just looks at me for a minute. Her chest rising and falling with every breath that she takes, the setting sun shining through the trees enough to cast dark shadows on her face.

“Do you remember anything?” she asks, and I just release a deep sigh, letting my shoulders drop. “You already know that I don’t. I said as much earlier. We—”

“We’ve done this before,” she says, effectively cutting me off. I draw my eyebrows together, confusion written all over my face. My spine straightens and my body tenses while I silently hope she’ll continue what she was saying. Instead, she just looks at me.

“We’ve done this before? Ran from people trying to kill us in the middle of nowhere?”

“No, not the whole ‘middle of nowhere with people trying to kill us’ part. But the whole running together. We’ve done that before. We know each other.” Then she looks down for a second before taking a deep steadying breath and stepping in front of me to continue the run. It catches me by surprise. Causes me to just stand there looking around for a moment hoping that my memory will serve me just as well, but I don’t remember anything other than my ridiculous fear of heights.

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