Where Silence Gathers (Some Quiet Place #2)(64)

The truck lurches into motion and Dad drives fast, tearing onto the road and away from our home. It’s raining so hard now that the world seems to be made of tears. The windshield wipers whip back and forth, back and forth, steady as a heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. With each movement water sloshes off the glass. Worry sits between Mom and Dad, blocking my view of her as she murmurs, “Will, I really don’t think you should be driving—”

“I’m fine.”

She keeps arguing with him, but it’s hard to hear with Hunter and the thunder. I find a toy airplane on the floor and swoop it through the air in front of my brother, hoping it will distract him. It does. He forgets to cry and stares at the plane, hiccupping. The trails on his plump cheeks begin to dry. I smile and make engine sounds, gliding and soaring the tiny thing through its tiny sky.

“Will!” Mom suddenly screams.

He jerks the wheel to the right, but it’s too late. Too late.

I drop the plane, and there’s an instant of absolute silence. My wide eyes see the headlights coming for us, the vein in my father’s temple, the horrified way my mother raises her hands in front of her face as if that alone will stop it. I see the brightness of the radio buttons and hear Elvis bellow even as the tires screech and the storm rages and my little brother wails again.

And I see him. The man in the other car. Our eyes meet just before everything explodes.

My world goes white. As I’ve done so often these last few months, I listen. I listen to metal tearing and my family’s screams cut off and the thud of the vehicle rolling and hitting the ground over and over. There’s more pain, but I don’t know where it is and it doesn’t matter anyway. My eyes are squeezed shut so tight it feels like they won’t ever open again.

Then everything is still.

Mom and Dad aren’t fighting anymore, and Hunter isn’t crying. They aren’t doing anything. I don’t want to open my eyes and look, but we’re upside down and my head is tingling. I have to move. So I look.

I don’t scream. I don’t recoil. I don’t sob. Blood pools on the ceiling, just next to my head. My family is utterly broken, and I know without touching them that I’ve been left behind. Hunter is still strapped in his car seat, within reaching distance. I can’t bring myself to touch him, though. I just stare. Can’t look away. Can’t understand how he was smiling moments ago and now he’s that thing that vaguely resembles my brother. There’s a strange smell in the air, not rain or soaked earth. Almost … rusty.

Suddenly I want out. I want out, I want out, I want out! I flatten my hands against the ceiling, mindless of the blood, and finally scream. No words, just a sound that isn’t even human. And someone does come.

Gradually I realize that I’m not as alone as I thought.

There’s movement out of the corner of my eye, and I turn my head so fast it hurts, thinking I was wrong and Hunter is alive. But this being has no trace of dimples or toothless grins. Instead, Death gazes at me with cold eyes. I have never met him before, yet I know it’s him. I shiver, unable to look away. He’s kneeling beside the truck, his coat dragging through the mud and his knees dampening from the puddle. Somehow it’s not demeaning. It only makes him more surreal and horrible. I know he’s here for my family.

This is the moment I begin to hate the creatures from the other plane.

Unable to meet those eyes anymore, I focus on my mother. She’s still so beautiful. Even though she’s silent and she’ll never speak again, her frantic whisper from earlier in the night fills my entire being until it’s my blood, my bones, my veins. I’m made of it. Stay, stay, stay.

“I don’t want to go,” I whimper, looking at Death again. I don’t know if it’s the truth. All I know is that I don’t want those pale hands to touch me.

His expression is fathomless. He doesn’t move. After a few unbearable seconds, he says in a voice that the darkness and the silence is made out of, “It’s not your time yet, little one.”

I blink, and he’s gone. So is everything else that mattered.

I come back to myself, drenched in sweat. Dad is gone, along with Sorrow and any lingering doubts I had about what I truly want. I sit against the lockers for hours, days, years, staring at a poster on the wall depicting a girl looking at college applications, preparing for a future I will never have. Suddenly, the meeting with Dr. Stern is insignificant. My search for answers, irrelevant.

I push myself up from the floor, somehow still holding my keys. There are bloody ridges in my palms from where I must have held them too tight. I drift down the hall, out the doors, to my car. I don’t think about where I’m going, and when the car stops I lift my head and see that I’m back at the apartment. Saul and Missy aren’t here.

When I climb up the steps, I see my mother rushing down them with plastered hair and wide eyes, her fear obvious. Then she disappears. Something twists inside me, and I pause with my hand on the railing, concentrating. But the pain doesn’t fade, and my insides don’t turn to stone no matter how hard I try. The sun keeps shining, oblivious to the fact that it shouldn’t be allowed to illuminate a place where things like this happen. Giving up, I drift to my room and shut the door. I sit on my bed and see myself, six years earlier, kneeling on the floor with my ear pressed to the crack between door and wall.

“Alex?”