Page 72 of Stalked By Shadows
He glanced my way, sewed a few strips together before finally pausing and saying, “I don’t want you to be mad.”
“I have no reason to be mad at you.”
“Everyone gets mad at me for some reason or another. Either because I don’t listen to what they say, or don’t believe what they say, or a little of both. But I’m just being me.”
I thought about that statement for a minute and could identify with it myself. It mirrored Lukas’s comment about me being flighty. Maybe Micah was a little flighty too. And that was okay since he seemed to work through it fine and get things done. “Being you is not a bad thing.”
He sighed. “It is sometimes. I went outside last night. Sat in the garden.”
“Like late? Or early I mean? When the noise usually comes?” That shocked me a little as he’d been so terrified of it.
“Yes. I needed to… I don’t know, face it or something. I’ve been running scared for so long, hiding from what I feel and hear because no one ever believes me. Even Sky who hears it brushes it off as something that can be explained or simply noise. And then the video of the cat—but it can’t have been the cat the whole time. I’ve only been here a year, and the other places I lived were all over town.”
“I did think of that,” I told him. “I wanted to give you some sense of peace that maybe it wasn’t something terrifying in your garden waiting to snatch you up the moment you let your guard down.” I thought about him sitting out alone in the dark last night and it made me worry, though there he sat, unhurt and seeming more confused than afraid. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” he admitted.
“Was there noise?”
Micah nodded. “I waited until I heard something before going outside. Even checked the cameras Tim installed, but there was nothing. I waited for it to happen again and when it did, I went outside and there was nothing…”
How frustrating and relieving all at once.
“I sat down beneath the tree and waited, terrified, but not willing to keep running away. For the first few minutes I thought my heart would explode with fear. But there was nothing. It makes me think it might really be something wrong in my head.”
“I’ve heard it too,” I reminded him.
He looked at me, his expression very serious. “But each time you’ve been willing to check it out, run toward it instead of away.”
“That doesn’t mean I wasn’t afraid. It may mean I’m stupid. I mean who runs toward danger?” I tried to joke.
He wasn’t that easily distracted. “When you saw something scary in the desert you didn’t run away.”
“No, but running away would have gotten me killed,” I said, telling him what I believed true from that day. “Only staying put saved my life and the lives of the men I held on to.”
“But you were afraid?”
“Terrified,” I agreed. “And without choices. We were in the middle of nowhere.”
“An entire army of soldiers and helpless,” Micah said.
“Not exactly an entire army. A unit.”
“But all trained with guns and self-defense.”
“Of course. Our troop was pretty well seasoned. I think the newest guy in was on his second tour.”
“But they all died and you didn’t.”
“There was a storm. A sandstorm, I guess. And I saw something in the swirling wind.” I thought about that terrifying vision that I’d blocked from so many of my memories only for them to replay in nightmares. It was a faceless man, or creature, like something out of a horror movie. Not real, everyone told me. I’d been the only one who had seen it, so it had to be all in my head. “The weather reports from that day claim there was no storm, yet everyone died, ripped to shreds. The army says I misremembered a missile attack, but I know what a missile attack looks like. This was something I had never seen before.” I watched him as he went back to sewing strips and worrying at his bottom lip in thought. “This is not a competition of who is braver, Micah. I would never have willingly gone out into that storm. I reacted on instinct and really most people would think I was a coward for staying in the tent when everyone else ran out to die.”
“Because being dead is better than being a coward?” He squinted at me. “You saved two men.”
“By laying in the doorway of the tent and sobbing like a baby.” Holy crap did that hurt to admit. How long had I swallowed that bitter pill of reality, hiding it from everyone because it made me feel worthless, weak, like, “A coward.”
Micah crawled to me, leaning over me to kiss me lightly on the lips. “Surviving doesn’t make you a coward. Doing what you have to do to survive doesn’t make you a coward. You saved two men. It’s not like you threw them to the wind to save yourself. You held on to them, kept them safe.”
Tears pricked the corners of my eyes and I swallowed hard. “Fuck, I thought I was over this.”