Page 34 of When the Night Comes Knocking

Jim’s eyes are hardly focused on anyone surrounding him, and again, it makes Thomas nervous—the last thing they need is a loose screw where the foundation is already primed to collapse.

“Y’all don’t want to listen to me, then you do. Y’all don’t, then you do,” the man mumbles, grabbing for the shotgun on the shelf. He knocks over several more boxes of cereal in the process. “Do whatever the hell y’all want. That thing has caught its scent on someone in here, and it’s not going away until it gets in.”

“Incredibly helpful,” says Ashley, and though the words are meant to be cold, Thomas can see that her indifference from moments before is swiftly cracking. “We should try the police again. Sheila really needs an ambulance.”

“You saw what happened to the police,” Jackson reminds her. “We’d only be inviting more victims, and way too many people have died already.”

He looks far more on edge and haggard than the annoyingly friendly Boy Scout he started out as earlier in the evening, though Thomas can’t imagine he looks much better himself; in fact, he would not be surprised to find that if he looks into a mirror, he’ll be a full twenty years older, sporting the same scraggly whiskers and deep creases as Jim.

“Jackson’s right. No one else should have to get hurt,” says Jane. Next to her, Winnie moves from Jackson’s side to paw at her leg, eliciting that worried whine again.

“So we wait until sunrise?” Kimi says, eyeing each of them. No one seems very eager to agree to anything, not when there are so many lives on the line.

Still, Thomas forces a nod. “It sounds like our only option,” he replies, though he isn’t sure if he actually believes that. All he knows is that the bright lights of the overheads are causing a pounding over his left eye, and his arm has started to hurt like hot hell.

“In the meantime, we can still take some precautions,” Jackson says, giving his full attention to Jane. “You mentioned the iron. Wanna try to find some?”

It’s there and gone in a flash, the way her body tenses and her eyes seem to look past Jackson all the way into the past. Then Winnie yips, and Jane nods.

“Try aisle nine. There should be a few fire pokers, some skillets,” says Kimi before facing Ashley. “I’ll come give you an extra hand with Sheila.”

Just like that, Thomas is watching Kimi follow Ashley back to the office while Jane joins Jackson. A gnawing feeling eats at him, and he suddenly feels as useless as Jim’s crushed beer can as they begin to walk off.

He turns to face the end of the aisle, where Winnie trails behind his sister and Jackson. “Jane,” he calls out. As she turns, he sees it there again in her expression, that sheer look of surprise that he’s voluntarily speaking to her.

Have I really been that bad? he wonders.

“Are you good?” he asks, briefly glancing over at where Jackson lingers close by.

The surprise on Jane’s face softens. “Yeah, I’m okay,” she says. “Thanks.”

Thomas nods, clutching his arm tightly and willing the pain to subside. “I’m going to go try to get a message off to Cassie,” he tells her. “Give some bullshit story about us having car trouble or something.”

Her eyes brighten slightly. “That’s a good idea,” she says, and before she strays any further, she adds, “Could you tell Cas not to worry? That we’re both alright?”

Thomas frowns as he nods again, watching Jane disappear around the aisle with Jackson. Out of everyone in the group, he supposes the Boy Scout isn’t the worst company for his sister to keep tonight.

Now alone, Thomas continues to stare forward at the store’s entrance, taking in the sight of the barricaded doorway and the threatening strip of night visible at the top of the glass. Somewhere out there, Death lies waiting with claws dripping blood.

Just wait until sunrise, he tells himself. You’ve waited through worse, haven’t you?

But as he turns to head back for the restroom to try to get service, he can’t help wondering if he’s just jinxed them all horribly.

Twelve

of any monster,

Ashley has never been bothered by blood. Truthfully, it has always comforted her in a strange way, serving as the most blatant reminder of life. If you bleed, you still exist. Your heart is still pumping for you, still trying for you even when everything else begins to fail, and God, does she know how often things fail.

It’s the sight of blood that’s currently plugging up the yawning hole inside her chest; it’s the many years of carefully honed compartmentalization skills that are allowing her to focus on what’s directly in front of her.

Blood has pooled on the floor at her feet now, dripping off the ledge of the table that Officer Sheila lies on, unconscious. The pair of Skechers Ashley is wearing are splattered with red, completely ruined, and even though they are the one and only pair of shoes she owns that comfortably fit her swollen feet now, she doesn’t care. At this moment, checking Sheila’s bandages and ensuring her leg is properly elevated, she simply feels like herself again.

When she was a little girl, Ashley would relish when her father arrived home from a long day at the hospital and told her stories of the various patients whose hearts he had operated on. She never cared that he talked about surgery more than he asked about their family—not in the way her mother did, anyway. Ashley was far too busy being fascinated.

Even when she was ten years old, her father had treated her like she was as smart as any other doctor from the hospital. If she’d fallen and scraped her knee, he’d say to her, “First, we have to find the source,” before placing a bandage and a kiss atop the small bit of hurt. “Everything has a cause and a solution, Ash. You just have to be clever and patient enough to find it.”

This soon became her motto for any obstacles or problems she encountered as she grew older. When she was failing o-chem in college: source = she had been studying wrong. When she and Evan had hit a stiff, near mechanical spell in their marriage a little over a year ago: source = not enough sex. When she had gotten pregnant right at the start of her new rotation at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta: source = too much sex.