Time Flies Ethan
Ethan followed Hunter down the front porch. He was freezing. He was hungry. He was frightened to the root of his soul.
Hunter just kept walking, and Ethan’s first instinct—his second, third, his twentieth—was to follow the man, go to their room, hide under the covers or under the bed or maybe just take himself out with the help of a firearm before whatever was waiting in the desert could tear him, very slowly, from limb to limb.
Ethan wasn’t cut out for whatever this night had in store for them. He wasn’t built for this.
Hunter looked back. “We need to get busy. If we start now, we can have our room barricaded by midnight. Whatever the twins have planned, we can deal with it.”
In the direction of the road, Ethan could still hear the soft wet whispers of flesh being eaten. “Do you really think we have a shot of surviving those things if the lights go out?”
Fernanda and Kyla had joined them on the porch. Kyla leaned against a wall, looking like she was barely keeping herself upright. “Who says the lights will even go out at midnight? If the twins are just planning to flip a switch somewhere, we can stop them, we can—”
As if the motel itself was laughing at her, the ring of lights flickered.
It was a soft stutter, so subtle Ethan was tempted to tell himself he’d imagined it.
All night long, the distant rumble of a generator’s engine had made up the texture of the motel’s ambience, part of the background noise Ethan had quickly stopped hearing, but when those lights stuttered, there was a change in the distant engine’s sound. It hitched, ever so slightly.
Ethan knew engines. He knew what that noise meant. “The generator’s running out of fuel.”
Kyla said, “Oh God.”
Fernanda stepped past Ethan, pushing open the door of room 5—it registered as strange, way down in his brain, that the girls’ door would be unlocked—and gestured for Kyla. “I do not know what is happening. I do not know what is coming. But we are not safe outside.”
Hunter nodded his agreement. He coughed, thumped his chest, took another step down the porch. Spitting out a mouthful of bloody phlegm, he said, “Let’s go.”
Kyla said, “Shouldn’t we at least try to figure out what happened to Sarah?”
“Why?” Hunter said. “Why should we have any reason to think the twins plan to help us? You heard Tabitha—this isn’t the first time they’ve done this.
They’re playing some sort of game. Even if they have some kind of bunker, and even if they have a way to keep us safe, we could still bring Sarah’s killer to them on a silver platter, and they could still leave us out in the cold.
First rule of survival: don’t play by other people’s rules. ”
Ethan thought back over the strange ultimatum the twins had made in the office. Had it felt… off? Yes. Staged. Performative. Like everything else about them. But did that necessarily mean they were lying?
Ethan said, “You heard what those things did to Stanley’s van. Do you really think our rooms will be any safer?”
Hunter took a third step down the porch. He was getting irritated. He was getting scared.
Imagine.
“Come on, Ethan. Now.”
But Ethan didn’t look at Hunter. He looked at Kyla, who appeared just as terrified, just as lost, as him.
On any other night, in any other life, that would have probably been the end of it. No one here was qualified to solve a crime. There was no reason to think there was even any point in trying. Ethan checked his watch. Nine o’clock. It would be midnight before they knew it, one way or the other.
And yet on this night, in this life, Ethan met Kyla’s gaze and held it.
He had no obvious reason to be friends with this girl, no good reason to think they could work together. That would have required trust, and Kyla and Fernanda had left him and Hunter to freeze on the side of the road.
But Kyla had apologized. She’d come to the office to find some towels and found Ethan and Hunter instead.
Dumb luck. Funny timing. It had given Ethan and Kyla a chance to speak, if just for a moment.
For Ethan to see the tremor in her eyes, the way she couldn’t quite stand still, like she was afraid she might need to bolt at any moment.
It had given Ethan the chance to see that Kyla was terrified and in over her head and fighting to keep it all together, just like him.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough to feel a faint connection with this girl. A little mutual understanding. Maybe the first flicker of trust.
Kyla held Ethan’s gaze. She didn’t look away.
Ethan gestured to room 4. “No harm in us just poking around for a couple minutes, right?”
Kyla gave the door of her own room a dubious kick, tugged at one of the metal bars on the window. She didn’t look impressed. She ignored Fernanda’s stare. Hunter’s anger. She looked out at the ring of light and the black desert and the dozens of yellow eyes that flickered in the dark.
She swallowed. “Beats the shit out of waiting to die.”