Page 36 of Dead By Dusk

“You don’t get to raise your voice to her. She did it your way, and it was a piss poor plan that almost got someone killed.She’sallowed to be mad. Not you. Raise your voice to her again, and you’ll find yourself missing your tongue. Understood?”

Strangled sounds escape his throat as his face reddens and his hands claw at my own. But I don’t loosen my grip in his struggle, only tighten it further at his delayed answer.

“I asked you a question. Do. You. Understand?”

He continues to struggle against me before urgently nodding his head, and it’s only then that I release him.

Then I hear the chaos around us. The sound of metal slamming against the wood of the door and breaking it apart. The crunching sound mixes with Silene’s grunts as I turn to watch her slam one of her axes into the area over and over again. Adonis has his arms wrapped around Carmen’s waist. He’s holding her back as she tries to reach her friend pleading Silene to slow down before she hurts herself.

But she doesn’t stop.

Silene keeps going over and over again until she’s able to break apart the small pieces of wood that are still connected and blocking the way through. When she’s done hatching and clawing, she drops the blade and lets it clammer to the floor asshe heaves, violently trying to catch her breath while staring at the damage she’s inflicted upon the door. The hole is big enough that we should all be able to bend through it if we desire to see the contents of the other side, though now that the opportunity is upon us, I’m not so sure I’m ready to find out what is waiting for us on the other side. If it weren’t for the fact that I know we need to and that I don’t want her going in alone, I probably would have left it alone for the night. Would have been okay with not knowing just a little longer: but anywhere she goes, I will follow.

And that’s what I find myself doing as she briefly casts a glance at all of us before slipping through the jagged wood of the broken door. The rest of us hesitate for a breath before I follow suit.

Memories invade my senses the second I see the bed centered against the far wall of the room. I refuse to look at anything else as I remember the late nights that would always end with us watching the rising sun as dawn came and passed. The stories we would tell each other to pass the time.

I remember the small pockets of time spent here, and it feels like everything.

“Do you see this?”

I take my time tearing the bed from my line of sight before turning toward her and what I assume she’s asking about.

I almost stop breathing altogether when I study the sheets of paper tacked to the wall.

Photographs of each of us line the walls, our personal information haphazardly scribbled onto Post-It notes attached to yet more printed pages of our lives. Names, birthdays, addresses, schools we attended, parents and siblings if we had them…everything you could know about us has been reduced to sentences and numbers inked onto the paper before us. The only thing more unsettling is the fact that the photographs aren’t justfrom our old day-to-day lives and interactions with each other prior to arriving here. There are also images of us here in the woods. Sleeping, fighting, walking.

There may not have been a single moment where we were truly alone.

My fingers brush over my own family history and see the names of parents that are still alive and doing well from the looks of it—living in the four-bedroom house off the coast of Whidbey Island I was born and raised in, apparently. But some information is blacked out, hidden from prying eyes, and it makes me wonder who would have access to these papers that wasn’t meant to know everything.

The next set of pages belong to Adonis, then William, Silene, Carmen, and lastly Nate. Every single page of lives we don’t remember and will remain just out of reach while information is still withheld. As our lives will remain our own in the little moments that no one sees and thoughts no one hears.

My eyes scan each page to see little bits of information on my counterparts. Adonis is the oldest at twenty-nine, while Carmen is the youngest at nineteen. Silene, the only one born outside the US, was raised in Greece but shortly moved here after the passings of both her parents: supposedly an accident, but the details are redacted. William was prior Military Special Ops. There’s not much about Nate’s family ties or personal life, but his early adulthood gives enough information to know that he was intelligent enough to graduate high school early and attend MIT where he earned his computer science degree.

Pieces of all of us that lead to this moment but don’t quite connect.

“What the fuck are you doing?” My shoulders tense at how calm his dark and lethal voice sounds. I turn to face Adonis, but he’s not looking at me, and instead, is glaring daggers at the women before us. I follow his line of sight to see Silene at theopposite wall standing next to a desk and computer screen. She shifts, and I realize what Adonis is referencing.

There is a corpse seated at the desk. I see the hole that had been put through his head and the blood spattered across the computer screen.

Silene is poking and prodding at the seated body, checking the stiffness in its neck and arms. My assumption is that her actions are to check for a brief idea of when this treacherous man had taken his final breath.

“I want to know when he died.”

She pays no mind to either of us as she makes quick work of her investigation. Neither of us stop her. To me, it seems like an open and shut case since the weapon that killed him lies near his body. It could have easily been a suicide. He could’ve been remorseful for his actions or sick of all the death he has likely been forced to witness. No one else has had access to this room, that we know of, at least. So the time of death doesn’t seem necessary at the moment. But I also don’t know much about forensics and Silene, if I recall her paperwork correctly, obtained her degree in the field.

“Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. He hasn’t even been dead for two hours,” she says as she stands behind him and examines the bullet hole before gazing at the blood.

“You can tell a lot by the bullet hole and blood trajectory. The angle the blood spattered suggests he was shot by someone standing much taller than he had been sitting. They probably knew each other given there’s no sign of a struggle beforehand. That, or he was unaware that anyone else was in here. But this was very recent.” There’s no room for question in her voice. No doubt marring her features, but instead morbid curiosity.

“That would be impossible, wouldn’t it? We would have heard something if that were the case. And no one has entered the house since we checked it.”

I’m not sure when he quietly entered the room, but it was Nate who voiced the question.

“Itwouldbe impossible,” she starts cooly and confidently before locking eyes with him. “It would be, if it weren’t one ofusthat killed him.”

18

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