Trevor locked the store.
Noah sat in the Corolla with the engine running and watched him do it, all of it, the front door and then the deadbolt and then the little pull test everybody does on a door they've just locked. He came out with a plastic bag and the register key on a lanyard around his neck.
"You're closing," Noah said.
"I'm not gonna be the guy who lost the drawer." Trevor got in and pulled the seatbelt across himself and clicked it, and then looked at the trash bag taped over the driver's window and didn't say anything about it, which Noah appreciated.
In the bag were two phone chargers and four roller hot dogs in foil.
"They were gonna get thrown out at eleven anyway," Trevor said.
*****
Fifth Street was dark for four blocks and then there was a house with every light on, upstairs and down, porch, garage, all of it blazing, and nobody in the windows.
Cypress was two streets past that.
Trevor talked the whole way, fast, in a voice that kept going up at the ends. He talked about his manager, who he'd called nine times. He talked about his sister in Tulsa. He asked Noah twice if the interstate was really closed and Noah said he didn't know both times, and Trevor said "yeah, yeah, okay," both times, like he was agreeing to something.
Then he said, "Hey, so what happened to you. For real."
"I don't know how to answer that."
"Okay," Trevor said. And then, quieter, "Okay."
Noah turned onto Cypress and put the car against the curb and shut the engine off, and let himself look at what he'd been not looking at since the gas station.
Twenty six.
Four houses on the left side of the street had them. One had four in what he was pretty sure was a kitchen. One had two by the front door, one on the porch, one out in the grass by the mailbox. They were all up on the surface. None of them were under anything.
He knew where all of them were and he couldn't do a single thing about any of it, and he understood then, sitting in a parked car on a residential street at eleven at night, exactly what he'd been given.
He couldn't find people. He could find bodies.
"Stay in the car," he said.
"Okay," Trevor said, immediately, with a relief so pure it was almost funny.
*****
The street smelled like cut grass and pennies.
Somebody's Ring doorbell was chiming softly two houses down, over and over, a little two note thing, going off at nothing.
Noah went up the sidewalk with the shovel from the cemetery, which he'd thrown in the back seat without thinking about it and which was the single luckiest decision he made that year.
Then he heard the voice.
"Help."
He stopped so hard he almost went down.
"Help me. Please. Please, somebody."
It was a woman. It was coming from a driveway about sixty feet up, past the streetlight that was out, and Noah was already three running steps toward it when the rest of his brain caught up with the front of it and grabbed it by the collar.
Those were his words.
Not close to his words. His. The order of them. The break in the middle where his voice had cracked on the second please. He'd said that into wet grass two hours ago with blood in his waistband, and there hadn't been a living person inside a quarter mile of him when he did it.
Noah got down behind a parked Tahoe and put his hand over his own mouth.
It came out of the driveway.
It was tall and pale and it moved like it was underwater, long slow strides that covered a lot of ground for how gentle they looked. Its arms were too long and it walked with them folded up against its chest, and in the middle of the chest there was a seam, and the seam was open about an inch, and the voice was coming out of there.
"Help me," it said, in his voice this time, his exact voice, a nineteen year old boy sobbing in a graveyard. "Somebody. Please."
It went down the middle of the street saying that.
At the third house it stopped.
The seam widened and the sound that came out was a woman, warm, a little hoarse, the way you sound at eleven at night.
"Mara, honey. Open the door."
Noah's whole body went cold.
Because that meant somebody was in there.
*****
He went around the back through two yards and a gate that wasn't latched, and the back door of the third house was standing open, and the kitchen had four of them in it and he knew that before he got to the step.
He went in anyway. He didn't look. He kept his eyes at chest height and moved through it and he'd be honest with himself about that choice later, and never out loud.
The hallway had a night light shaped like a turtle.
"Mara," he said, as quiet as he could and still be a sound. "Mara, my name's Noah. I'm not the thing outside. I'm a person."
Nothing.
"I'm gonna say something the thing outside can't say. It doesn't know what happened at the cemetery." He put his back against the wall. "I threw up twice. I called for my mom. I lost a shoe."
A long five seconds.
Then a voice in the bathroom, very small, said, "You have one shoe?"
Mara was nine, and she was in the bathtub with a bath towel over her head and her knees against her chest, and she'd been in there long enough that when she stood up her legs didn't work right and Noah had to hold both her elbows while she got them back.
She looked at the doorway to the hall and Noah moved to stand in it.
"We're going out the back," he said. "You're gonna hold onto the back of my shirt. Don't let go and don't look sideways."
"My mom's outside," Mara said. "She's calling me."
Noah crouched down so his eyes were level with hers, in a dark hallway, with a turtle night light on his face, and did the hardest thing he did all night.
"That's not her," he said. "I'm sorry. That's not her."
Mara looked at him for a while.
Then she took hold of the back of his shirt in both fists, and did not say another word for two hours.
*****
They got as far as the back step.
The thing was in the yard.
It was standing between them and the gate, thirty feet out, arms folded up on its chest, head tilted, not moving. Waiting on a sound. It hadn't heard them yet, because the grass was wet and Mara only had socks on and Noah had one shoe, which was the second luckiest thing that happened to him that year.
Noah stood in the doorway with a nine year old attached to his shirt and did the thing he does. He stopped trying to fix it and looked at what was in the room.
What was in the room was a kitchen with four dead people in it and a set of car keys on a hook and a bowl of apples.
And in his back pocket, where it'd been for four days, was his mother's phone.
He got it out. He held it against his stomach so the screen wouldn't throw light on the yard, and he unlocked it with his birthday, and he went into the clock.
New alarm. Two minutes out. He typed the label because the field was sitting there open and his thumbs did it before he decided anything.
TELL NOAH GOOD LUCK.
He set it on the kitchen counter face up, next to the apples.
Then he walked backward down the hall with Mara's fists in his shirt, into the front room, and got the front door open one inch at a time, and they stood in the entryway in the dark and waited.
It took a long time.
Noah found that he was counting. He was thinking about the finance woman at the funeral home saying compassion discount with her hands folded, and about the eighteen cents, and he did not know why his brain had chosen that, and he let it, because it kept him from listening to the other thing.
The alarm went off.
It was so loud. In an empty house at eleven at night it was the loudest thing in the world, the same six notes that had gone off every weeknight for a year and a half while a woman in a hospital bed by the window said did you eat, and the screen lit the ceiling of that kitchen and the words on it were TELL NOAH GOOD LUCK.
The thing came through the kitchen window without opening it.
Noah ran.
It caught him in the hallway. Not solidly. It came past him going for the light and the sound, and one of those long folded arms opened up as it went by, and something on the inside of it went across his hip and down.
He didn't stop. He didn't even look.
He got Mara out the front and down the walk and across the grass and Trevor had the back door of the Corolla open before Noah could yell anything, standing up out of the car with a hot dog still in his hand, and Mara went in headfirst and Noah went in after her and Trevor got in and Noah started the car.
Behind them, in the house, the six notes cut off in the middle.
*****
He got two blocks and stopped in the middle of the road.
He sat with both hands on the wheel and the engine running and looked in the mirror, back down Cypress, at the third house with the front door standing open.
"What," Trevor said. "What. What is it."
"Nothing."
"You stopped."
"I know."
He could go back. It'd be forty seconds. It would be forty seconds and a nine year old in the back seat with her socks soaked through, sitting in a car with a broken window on a street where twenty six people had died in the last hour.
Noah put his hand over his mouth for a second, the way he had behind the Tahoe.
Then he put the car in drive.
"Kid," Ellery said, once, gently.
"Don't."
"Okay."
They drove. Nobody said anything for six or seven blocks, and then Mara, from the back seat, in a voice like she was asking about the weather, said:
"Is that your mom's phone?"
Noah watched the road.
"Yeah," he said.