Page 71 of When the Night Comes Knocking

The boom of a gunshot sounds from overhead before metal pops against the side of Jim’s truck bed, hitting over a foot away from the propane tank. Thomas hears Kimi curse, and the Mimic shifts down onto all fours, its eyes locked on him and Jane with that endless hunger.

It screeches, long and shrill, and Thomas knows it is going to charge them, knows it will take them down together in one final burst of flames, rendering them as helpless as they were months before.

He squeezes his eyes shut, covering Jane’s head with his arms as its burning talons rise into the air.

“Ama, stop!”

The words are like their own shell firing through the air. Thomas cracks open his eyes as the Mimic turns its burning body. The creature raises its head, where the gray skin melts and sags from the skull. It looks up toward the roof.

“Grandma, please,” Kimi shouts, her voice breaking off sharply. Against the blazing fire, a sheen of tears glistens against her cheeks. “This has to end!” she cries, gripping the gun tighter.

With the Mimic’s back turned, Thomas yanks Jane to her feet, dragging them both toward her car. He glances back once to see the total stillness of the creature, its body now one orange flame, terrible and mesmerizing where it burns away the shadows.

“It has to end,” says Kimi.

Almost as soon as the trance is placed upon it, the Mimic’s screech sings out again with the blast of the final gunshot.

Thomas shields Jane and drops to the ground as an explosion of fire lights up the night.

Twenty-eight

Just before the girl could give up,

Grace was back again. It had been like clockwork, every night for over a week, when the knocking would start up. Kimi hung her head against the front door, choking on a sob as the voice called out from beyond the dim light of the front porch.

“I thought we were friends,” the voice said over and over in a sad, delicate pitch until Kimi felt ready to claw out her eardrums.

“Please stop,” she cried, sliding down the back of the door to the floor. She tugged at her hair, rocking back and forth. “Please, please just stop!”

Eventually, Grace always did; the knocking would cease in the space of a breath, leaving a ringing quiet to fall over the house’s front room, where Kimi had been putting on and taking off her shoes for as long as she could remember. But in the silence, she had felt it—that hungry, wrong presence standing just beyond the faded green of the front door.

Waiting.

Later that evening, Kimi’s hands trembled as she handed Ama a glass of water to wash down her myriad of pills. Despite how dreadfully the cancer had changed the rest of her body, her grandmother watched her with the same intense, unshaken expression she’d always worn.

I think Ama was a hawk in another life, Grace had once told her years before, when they still did simple things like paint each other’s nails and discuss who from their class they might like to kiss.

Kimi’s shaking hand placed the water glass back on the bedside table.

“Who is it?” Ama finally asked after swallowing her bedtime medicine. “Who keeps knocking at our door at this hour?”

Kimi had refused to say it aloud, in part because Nate had made her promise him, but also because, left unspoken, it felt like there was still some chance of it not being real—that she wasn’t the reason her best friend was dead. Ama’s hawklike stare softened slightly, and Kimi realized then that there were tears gliding down her own cheeks.

“Ama,” she whispered, and just like that everything inside of her crumpled. She dropped to the bedside as the sobs racked her body in violent waves while her grandmother placed a withered hand atop her head.

“It was an accident, I swear it was an accident,” Kimi cried, choking on the words. “Nate was driving and it was so dark. She just ran out of nowhere, into the road. Grace, she—”

The words turned to nothing in her mouth as another cry escaped. There wasn’t much else to say that her grandmother couldn’t infer; Grace Meadows had been declared a missing person for over a week, under the likely guise of a teenage runaway grown tired of small-town mountain life. Most of the locals assumed the beautiful girl was finally Hollywood-bound and the next time they’d see her would be on the big screen.

Only Kimi knew that her friend’s body was rotting beneath a pile of leaves and fallen branches deep in the woods, never to be beautiful or bound for anything again.

“I’m so sorry,” she wept, clinging to her grandmother.

For a while, Ama said nothing. She simply continued to brush her hand through Kimi’s hair, until the latter had no more tears to shed and her shaking frame had stilled from exhaustion.

“You’re certain she’s gone?” Ama finally asked.

Kimi shuddered, wishing more than anything that she could forget just how certain she was. “Yes,” she said, sniffling. “Nate made sure of it.”