Page 73 of When the Night Comes Knocking

When Kimi burst through the screen door and onto the front porch, she looked around frantically, chest heaving. “Ama!” she screamed out into the night. “Ama! Ama, where are you?”

As she descended the few steps that led down into the yard, she paced the dying grass desperately, gasping for air beyond the suffocating humidity and bright panic flooding through her body. She slipped her phone from her back pocket, ready to call Nate despite the fact that he had been sending her to voicemail for days.

Then the flash of something shiny caught her eye. She lowered the phone, staring out at the tree line near the house, where whatever it was glimmered against the light of the full moon overhead. Kimi took small steps toward it, sucking in a breath at the puddles of blood that littered the ground the closer she got.

When she arrived at the trees, the first thing she saw was the slippered feet poking out. Kimi’s eyes trailed up the length of a bloodstained pink robe, until she stared down at where her grandmother’s mouth hung open.

Ama’s eyes gazed upward, defiant and unseeing, as her gold necklace winked beneath the moonlight.

Her heart was gone.

Twenty-nine

the sun began to rise.

Dawn settles over the store’s parking lot, washing the bloody carnage in hues of rosy pink.

“So much for having an appetite today,” a young deputy says as he escorts two gloved men carrying a body bag.

“Happy Thanksgiving, right?” one of the gloved men replies. He glances over Thomas as they pass before muttering something to the deputy.

All around him, ambulances and first responders flock out in flashes of uniforms and blue lights. It’s almost funny, seeing them try to make sense of the disaster zone of Blackwell’s Country Store.

Thomas leans against the hood of Jane’s car, silently observing the chaos. His limbs are heavy and weak, mind completely spent, and yet every time he feels his eyes drifting shut, he finds himself startling awake to locate his sister amongst the crowd. It isn’t very difficult—he just searches for someone who looks like they could be the star of a slasher movie.

“Hey.”

Kimi approaches him with a shiny blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her hair has fully fallen out of its ponytail, framing her tired, soot-stained face messily.

She pauses next to him, propping herself up against the car. “You doing okay?” she asks.

Thomas laughs. “Absolutely peachy. You?”

Her eyes fall to the charred black spot on the ground where the Mimic burned hours before. A gentle breeze picks up some of the remaining dust—the ashes of its leathery gray skin—and blows it along the dirt, where it tumbles away until it’s no longer discernible.

“I have no idea,” she replies. “I’m pretty fucking glad to be alive, though.”

Thomas nods, still trying to wrap his mind around the secret the cashier had been carrying for seven years. He stuffs his hands into his pockets, glancing down at all the fallen red leaves beginning to turn brown and curl inward.

“Do you think she was set free?” he asks quietly. “Your grandmother?”

Kimi’s lip trembles slightly before straightening into a familiar firm line. “I have to believe she was,” she says, gripping her gold necklace. “The alternative is I wind up in one of those nice padded cells you were talking about earlier, straitjacket and all.”

Thomas knocks his shoulder against hers. “Aim high.”

In the aftermath of the explosion, when Kimi had finally explained the truth of her grandmother’s sacrifice, Thomas felt a sickness rise up inside. It all seemed like cursed knowledge resurrected by the mountain itself, marking each of them with a trace of permanent shadow. After all, is it really better to know that such dark fates exist? That where there is good, there is an even hungrier wickedness?

Thomas doesn’t know for sure. All he knows is for now, they have restored the balance.

He glances down at Kimi. “What are you gonna do now?” he asks.

She exhales a long sigh. “Now I have to go see Miss Meadows in the nursing home, tell her that her son and nephew won’t be joining for Thanksgiving today,” she says, wrapping the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll tell her everything.”

A sour taste fills Thomas’s mouth. Out of everything Kimi has shared, what happened to Grace rattles him the worst; in the end, the only monsters that failed the young girl were people.

“Don’t you think the whole truth might just hurt worse?” he says.

“Yes,” says Kimi, kicking some leaves with the toe of her Converse. “But it’s still the truth.”