Page 54 of The Compound

Eighteen

Out in the desert I saw no creature at all, nor any trace of any living thing.

Sam had walked this way, and Jacintha, and Ryan, and all the rest, but there was no evidence that they’d ever been here.

I ran, using the moon as a guide, trying to count the minutes that went by.

I didn’t go far: better to be early than late, and have Tom hear me coming back in.

I dropped most of the pieces of meat as far out as I dared, left the shears at the perimeter, then dashed back to the compound, leaving a trail of blood behind me.

I placed the last few pieces of meat around the side and front of the house, where Tom and I had just sat for dinner.

My hands were throbbing, still dripping blood. When I came in through the door, the shower was still humming.

“Tom!” I shouted, running up the stairs. “Tom, come quick! Tom!”

The water stopped at once. I heard the shower door slide open. I was standing outside the bathroom door.

“Did you call me?”

“Come quick! Please!”

He wrenched the door open, a towel tied around his waist.

“What is it? What’s happened?” He looked at me properly, my hands red with blood, my face stricken. “ What’s happened? ”

“Outside, please!” I let my voice be swallowed by sobs. “It’s outside!”

He ran down the stairs, his feet flying. “Stay here!” he yelled.

I checked the bathroom. He had left his knife sitting on the ledge.

I took it, holding it behind my back, and followed him down the stairs.

When he was through the front door, I closed it behind him.

There was no lock on it—we hadn’t anticipated needing one—and so I dragged a cabinet from the kitchen and placed it in front of the door.

It was heavier than I had thought, still full of random objects, and I struggled for a few moments, adrenaline soaring through me, teeth gritted, before it covered the entrance.

I then quickly gathered the heaviest objects I could find—cast-iron skillets and a few pans, plus the weights Tom had been using earlier—and added them to the lower shelves for ballast.

“Grab a light!” he shouted. “I can’t see anything out here!” I kept my back against the cabinet, my heart knocking against my ribs. I heard him moving around, and then he said, “It’s too dark—what was it you saw?”

I said nothing, didn’t move an inch, and he sounded more urgent now. “Lily, can you hear me? What did you see? Lily—what’s out here?”

I sat on the floor. September twentieth, Becca had said: the day Sam left.

How long ago had that been? Less than a week?

More? Without work, without a schedule, I had no reason to mark the days, and had been living in a strange, timeless limbo that now horrified me.

How did I not know what day of the week it was?

I closed my eyes and went through the weeks, counting on my fingers.

Twelve weeks. Twelve times seven. That was doable, I reasoned.

Seventy plus fourteen. Eighty-four. I knew that, at least.

“Lily! Can you hear me? Fetch me a light!”

Eighty-four times twenty-four. I clutched my head. Without a calculator was one thing, but without pen or paper was another.

Tom was at the door. It rattled, but didn’t open. “Open the door, Lily; there’s nothing out here. It’s fine.”

But was I even sure that I had the number of weeks right? Had it really been a week since Becca told Sam the date? How long since Sam had gone? Forever; forever!

“Open the door, Lily,” he repeated. The door rattled again. Behind me, the cabinet stayed where it was. He cursed loudly. I heard his footsteps move around the house, toward the back door.

Becca had left yesterday. Was it yesterday? No, two days ago. And we had gone without water for two days. Three days? Two days. But how long before that? Did Tom know what day it was? Had he seen Becca’s record, or had he kept his own?

I heard the back door handle shake, and Tom’s heavy tread around the outside of the house. He was checking for open windows. I heard him go to the downstairs bathroom window—closed—and then the other spare room—closed.

I shot to my feet. The window in Tom’s room; I hadn’t checked it.

I ran as quickly as I could, my feet loud on the wooden floors.

His lamp was on in the corner, and I could see the top window, just slightly ajar.

When I got to the window, I screamed: there was a figure in the window, covered in blood.

But it was me, it was only me, my reflection catching me by surprise.

I must have touched my face with my bloody hands; there were smudges of scarlet across my face.

My arms, too, as I reached up to close the window, were covered in lines and streaks of blood.

I had cut my left leg on the barbed wire in my hurry, and there were small rivulets of blood there, too.

My hands had only just stopped bleeding.

The handle of the window was high up, and I stretched toward it, my fingers reaching, reaching, when Tom appeared on the other side.

His face was twisted in rage; mine, I could see, was open with shock.

I could almost reach the handle to close it, but not quite.

If I turned to get the chair, Tom would have time to open it further and wrestle his way in before I could stop him.

He seemed to realize the same thing at the same time: he jumped up, his fingers brushing the bottom of the window but not quite finding purchase.

I scrambled onto the windowsill, pressing myself close to the windowpane and grabbing the curtain rail so I wouldn’t fall.

I grabbed the inside handle on the window just as Tom got hold of the frame.

I pulled, hard. His hold was slipping: he wedged his hand in, but I pulled harder, crushing his fingers, and he screamed in pain and removed his hand.

The window closed with a resounding bang.

“Let me in now, and I won’t hurt you, Lily. I want to live peacefully together, I promise.”

I stared out, my reflected face clear and pale before me, his shadowed and out of focus. Suddenly, his face came into focus as he leaned close against the glass. His hand slammed against the window with enough force that I flinched. “Let me in!”

I examined the glass, looking for cracks, but it had stayed intact. “Do the challenge and I’ll let you in. You say your answer, then I say mine.”

I tried to look past my face and see his instead. I couldn’t make out much. He spat at the window, right between where my eyebrows were reflected.

He stepped away and disappeared into the night.

—

I sat by the front door, Tom’s knife resting in my lap.

I thought maybe fifteen minutes had passed, possibly more, since I had locked him out.

I could hear him walking around the house, banging at the boarded window and trying to budge the front door.

I tried to tune him out as I did my calculations.

I was sure I could do it if I was at ease and had some paper.

But I jumped at every noise and kept getting up to check on the windows.

In the struggle with the gray room’s window, my right hand had started to bleed again.

I couldn’t keep the numbers in my head, and eventually wrote out the sums in my blood on the floor.

The problem, of course, was that I was bad at math, and he was good at it. The task catered to him—but hadn’t the last one, the race, been suited to him as well?

It was possible that Tom knew exactly how long it had been, but I thought that he wasn’t sure, otherwise he would have suggested that we do it right away. How many days were in November? Every time my mind reached for an answer, my hand itched for my phone.

Suddenly, I heard Tom shout out. He was, I think, somewhere near the side of the house, by the patio. He shouted again, louder, wilder, and I resisted the urge to get up. This would be the difficult part.

“Back!” he yelled. “Get back—get back!” Suddenly he was banging on the blocked front door, just inches fromme.

“Let me in! Lily, let me in! There’s something out here! Lily, open the door! Lily! There’s a—I can’t see, but there’s something out here! Let me in— let me in !”

I could feel the door shaking, but the cabinet was large and bottom-heavy and the barricade held strong.

“Answer the question,” I shouted. “How many hours until Christmas?” My voice was not as steady as I wanted it tobe.

“There is something out here !”

Silence fell for the space of a couple of heartbeats.

I heard a crash, and though I had promised myself that I wouldn’t look, I found myself rising from the ground and crossing to the living room.

I kept the light off, and watched from the corner.

Tom had broken apart a chair, and had one of its legs in one hand and the seat in the other. In the dark, two eyes glowed.

“Get back!” he bellowed. “Back!”