Page 47 of When the Night Comes Knocking

“We were just trying to keep everyone safe,” Ashley adds, wincing as she presses a thick wad of crumpled tissue against her collarbone. “But maybe Jackson’s okay? I don’t think his wounds were bad enough to kill him immediately.”

“Isn’t that a comfort,” Jane hisses, turning her face away. She goes to the doors then, peering out through the drawn blinds that cover jagged bits and pieces of remaining glass.

“I don’t see him anywhere,” she says, and Thomas can practically see the wheels turning behind her eyes, imagining what heinous kill methods the Mimic might be using on the young man somewhere out in the woods at this very moment.

“He could have made a run for it,” Kimi suggests, looking out at the darkened parking lot. “Jackson’s a strong guy—he might have even made it out to the main road.”

Thomas fixes her with a glare. “That’d sure make you feel better, wouldn’t it?”

“I already told you that the Mimic fooled us. We made a mistake,” Kimi says.

Jane drifts away from the entrance, peering out at the sprawl of aisles and collapsed shelves. Her hair falls into her eyes in a mess of short, tangled waves, though she doesn’t try to move it. “Jackson wouldn’t run. He wouldn’t leave Winnie behind,” she says, and her gaze suddenly widens. “Where’s Winnie?” she asks, voice inching up an octave.

“I’m sure she’s probably just hiding, Jane,” Thomas answers when no one else bothers to. “Unless these geniuses thought the Mimic turned into a dog and decided to put her out too—”

“Christ, we get it,” Kimi snaps.

Ashley shakes her head, sniffling. The tissues at her collarbone have soaked through with red, and her cheeks look paler than before as she looks down at her stomach. “I never even suspected something was off with Sheila. She looked so normal, Jane, I swear. It just—it just tricked me,” she says, giving a pitiful shrug.

“It tricked all of us,” adds Kimi, and the hardness in her eyes is like a battering ram as they settle on Thomas.

The sound of a can crunching draws their attention. Jim stares at the wreckage of the entrance, now barely covered with one set of crushed blinds and the same makeshift items they’d used when there were still fully intact doors.

“This is how it hunts,” he announces before tossing the crushed beer can atop the heap.

The man’s hairline is slick with sweat as he removes his baseball cap, wiping at his lined forehead. “This thing isn’t just killing for food. It’s a game,” he says. From his baggy jeans’ pockets, he pulls out another beer. “All the little imitations and taunting—the way it’s taking its time with us—it’s all just a big damn game to get us to play with it.”

Thomas’s arm throbs with pins and needles. The numbness spreads down from his elbow, flowing to his wrist and out to the very tip of each of his fingers. He imagines ice spreading angrily in his veins, chilling the last of his working nerves until they’re all simply frozen, and he knows if he doesn’t distract himself, then a panic attack will ensue—one where he swears the limb is not his own anymore.

“Why would it bother making a game of it?” he says, forcing himself to meet Jim’s drunken eyes. For a moment, he clings to the brief hatred flashing through him, hoping it might vanish the wave of hysteria pressing inward.

He never got to look into the eyes of the drunk driver who had sent them off the road—never got to tell the guy to go royally fuck himself. Instead, he had to see a student the same age as him be posted in endless Instagram tributes and grieved for at candlelight vigils all over campus.

Thomas had already cut back on drinking as soon as Coach Scott told him that the Braves were interested in him, but now, not drinking is one of the few choices he still has control over. He gladly spent his twenty-first birthday at the start of the month with his phone turned off and the blinds drawn shut, letting the day pass by as insignificantly as all the rest.

Jim takes several uneasy steps, his shoulders slouched forward. “There are wild animals that kill for food, and there are wild animals that kill just for the hell of it,” he says. Billy’s blood is long dried onto his face, leaving a crust like red dirt stuck to his jaundiced cheeks. “Our fella out there”—he thrusts a thumb toward the entrance—“maybe he needs to play with his food before he eats it.”

Jim pauses next to Jane then, eyeing her with a coldness that causes Thomas’s posture to straighten. “I reckon it’d make us tastier, huh, girlie?”

“Point made, Jim,” says Kimi in a careful, bomb-defusing tone. “Did the Mimic say anything to you in the office, Jane?”

Thomas sees the fear instantly cloud his sister’s face. She’s impossibly pale under the overheads, and it occurs to him suddenly how unhealthy she looks. When had she started to look so unwell? And why weren’t their parents or Cassie doing anything about it?

Jane wraps her arms around herself, swallowing a few times before speaking. “It didn’t say much at first. Just tasted my blood,” she begins, gesturing to the red cut on her cheek. “But—but it was like my blood let it see things. Things that were my fault.” She pauses, wiping a hand beneath her eye. “Things that I regret,” she adds.

A sharp ache shatters through the numbness of Thomas’s arm so swiftly that he clamps down on his tongue to keep from crying out. His temples take up a drumbeat as the walls of the store threaten to close in again, as they threaten to force him back into the small, caged space of his destroyed car with the taste of blood in his mouth and the smell of smoke in his nose. He turns away, forcing in deep breaths and focusing on a spilled pile of dog kibble next to his shoes.

Jim’s eyes rake over Jane. “You’re the guilty heart it wants,” he says.

As she just sits there and nods, Thomas interjects without thought. “Just stop it, alright? We don’t know who it wants,” he says, ignoring his sister’s shocked, dazed eyes. “Everyone has shit they aren’t proud of. Hell, I bet every one of you had something come to mind when Kimi told us what draws out the Mimic.”

He swallows hard and drops his gaze to the floor, staring at the shredded rips in his jeans where the monster’s talons dug in. The muscle and skin pulsate along his calf, throbbing with a sharp ache as blood begins to turn his left sneaker red.

Thomas clears his throat, hoping his voice holds strong. “I know it could want my heart,” he admits.

Sure, the Mimic had chased after Jane earlier, but the monster had grabbed him. And if his sister had let go of his hand in the aisle, would the Mimic have simply mauled him in the same careless, animalistic craze as it had done to Officer Whitmore? Would it have bestowed the same unfortunate fate that Evan had met, piercing its claws clean through his chest before dumping his body like an afterthought?

Or would it have looked inside him and found exactly what it’s killing for?