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The lock clicks as Ashley twists it.

“Ask him something,” Jane blurts out.

Ashley pauses with her grip on the handle.

Jane curls her fingers into tight fists, feeling all eyes shift to her. She swallows hard and looks out at Evan’s form to find his dark eyes are locked on her too, probing and cold enough that her feet shuffle backward of their own accord.

“Ask him something first,” Jane repeats, glancing to where Ashley’s hand rests on a now unlocked door. “Ask him something only he would know the answer to.”

A gleam of betrayal flashes in the woman’s eyes, though it is swiftly refocused on Kimi when the cashier nods in fervent agreement, pointing her pocketknife toward the door.

“You could have opened the door by now,” Jane continues, keeping her focus entirely on Ashley. She can’t look at Evan standing out there in the shadows any longer, can’t bear the wrongness of his eyes or the smell of rot poisoning the air. “You could have opened that door already, but you haven’t yet. You haven’t because you know something isn’t right. Right?”

Jane tries to swallow down the fear lancing each of her words, though her heart only seems to pump it faster through her blood with every rapid beat.

Ashley lets out something like a scoff and a sob as she finally notices that Jim has the shotgun pointing almost directly at her.

“It ain’t no skin off your back to ask. Shouldn’t be for him to answer,” Jim says, staring down the barrel of the gun. His jaw is set painfully tight, and for once his shoulders are not drooped in a slouch as he stands with his feet shoulder width apart.

Thomas’s voice is a small nudge. “Ask,” he says.

The woman’s lip trembles as she eyes them all where they stand in a strange half circle like a frontline formation of their own pitiful army. She turns to face Evan, her head hanging several degrees lower. “Honey,” she begins, sniffling, “when is the baby going to be born?”

The silence that falls over them is heavy and laced with the low grumbling caught in the back of Winnie’s throat. Evan shifts outside, until his hands retract from the glass. “You really have to ask me that?” he says, and a low sob escapes him. He wraps his arms up to cover his bloodied chest, shaking with more cries. “Ashley, please. I’m so scared.”

Her face crumples, but she forces it level with her husband’s. “Just answer the question,” she whispers.

Jane notes the way Thomas shifts back, settling at her side and clutching his cast to his chest. The vulnerability in his eyes is foreign to her, something her brother has always done well to squash and smother down even in the worst of times. Even when he first woke up in the hospital after the accident, it was only anger caked there, bright and palpably strong where it flowed down his body and seemed to coat every space he inhabited, with Jane always proving the most effective catalyst.

“Please, help me. Please!” Evan calls out, beginning to weep in the darkness.

“I can’t do this to him,” Ashley gasps, then grips the door handle again.

“Don’t!” Kimi shouts, loud and authoritative. “He can answer this question first. I’m not letting him in if he doesn’t.” Jane can hear the unspoken words: I will take you down if you try.

“Kimi’s right,” adds Jim, cocking the gun for good measure. “That door ain’t opening unless he can prove himself. I’ll move you myself if I have to.”

Ashley braces against the table, nearly hyperventilating as she tries to get the words out. “When is the baby going to be born, Evan?” she asks again, with all the desperation of someone rediscovering prayer. “Evan, for Christ’s sake, just answer me!”

But Evan doesn’t answer; instead, he moans out in pain, bending over to clutch his chest where blood trickles out faster, like paint splattering onto the ground.

“What date, Evan?” demands Ashley as Evan only whimpers out for help. She screams the question again and again, and when the bang sounds on the door, it is no longer Evan’s hand. The long, curled talons scrape down the glass, eliciting a violent shriek like nails on a chalkboard.

Ashley’s scream goes level with Winnie’s barking.

Kimi and Jane rush forward to help pull the woman around the table, while Thomas and Jackson shift it back into place in front of the doors. Thomas flips the lock just as those claws land on the handle outside.

“Ashley, wait!” Evan’s voice calls desperately as he beats on the door until the glass begins to splinter. “Don’t leave me alone out here. Don’t leave me to die!”

Kimi pulls a string at the side of the door, letting a set of flimsy blinds slide down until they hit the edge of where the table rests against the glass. Jane tugs Ashley back, moving with her down the closest aisle as the woman cries uncontrollably.

Jane stares back at the entrance, unsure if she’s even breathing. Kimi backs away from the doors, wide eyed and gripping a golden necklace at her throat. Jim pulls the cashier back, pushing her in the direction of Thomas and Jackson as he retreats with his gun still aimed at the closed blinds.

They all file down the aisle with the liquidy movements of phantoms, silent and wayward. Ashley’s body is heavy and her belly is pressing uncomfortably against Jane’s abdomen, but she can’t bear to falter, can’t bear to let this woman fall any further while a mockery of her husband waits right outside.

This time when Jane meets her brother’s eyes, she does not have to guess at what he is thinking; it is there all over his face, frightened and as terribly certain as he had been of their own fate during the accident, trapped in that impossible darkness just two months before.

We are going to die.