Page 99 of The End of the World As We Know It

Right outside. We had to move.

I didn’t have the luxury of cracking the door open—I couldn’t just pop my head out to see what was coming. If we were opening this door, we were running, and if we were running, we weren’t coming back.

I turned to grab Danny—to try and, as gently as possible, get him awake and moving, quietly. But as I stepped back and looked at the bed, my heart just about exploded.

He was gone.

The towels were there—hastily spread out. The stuffed tiger was there, too, splayed out near the foot of the bed. But Danny was gone. I strained to look around the small, dark room.

“Danny?” I hissed his name, desperate and frightened. “Danny,donde estas?”

I darted into the cramped bathroom. Nothing.

I moved back into the main room itself, the moonlight sneaking through the window serving as the only illumination.

There was only one place he could have gone.

I crouched down and looked under the bed. There he was, way back against the wall, the white of his eyes visible even in this darkness. He was clutching himself, trying to make himself as small as he could. I reached a hand out to him.

“Danny, come out,” I whispered. “We have to go.”

“Mami, no, they’re coming—he’scoming,” Danny said, the fear plain on his face. His voice sounding off-balance and delirious, as if he were still mid-dream. “He’s coming to get me, Mami.”

I moved to the other side of the bed, which brought me a little closer to him, though he was still out of reach. I crouched down and tried to slide farther under the bed, but I couldn’t fit. I reached out my hand, palm up, and raised my voice slightly.

“Danny, we need to leave this place, right now, okay?” I said, trying to remain calm, trying to give off a sense that this was all part of the plan. But Danny was smart. There was no plan anymore. We were in hell, and we just wanted to try and survive. “Please come out, sweetie, okay? I need to figure out how—”

Thump.

Louder. Closer.

I pushed myself under the bed, feeling my back lifting up the metalframe and squeezing myself through, the adrenaline muting whatever pain I’d feel later. If there was a later.

My hand roughly grabbed Danny’s arm and I tugged him toward me and out from under the bed, ignoring his squeal of surprise. I stood up, panting, clutching him to me, my arm wrapped around him—my other hand still clutching the gun. We were both breathing heavily in the darkened room, my eyes locked on the door. I looked at the flimsy chair in the gloom, propped against the handle. The noise had stopped.

But the door handle was moving. Jerking up and down, faster each time.

I saw the metal handle turn down slightly, then back up, clicking and clacking, but not fully opening. Whoever was on the other side was desperate to get in, and we had nowhere else to go.

“Mami, what—”

“Don’t worry,” I said, like a reflex—words I’d said so often they became almost mantra-like. “Get behind me.”

I looked around the darkened room—hoping I could find something, anything I’d missed before. A secret tunnel. A ladder. A magical warp that would send us to another level far from this dank, terrible place where everything was broken, dirty, and cracked, where nothing felt right. I wanted to curl up and cry for days—to just expel everything and then fade into the soil, to be recycled and fed into the earth so I could be of use to something again.

But, of course, I couldn’t do any of that.

I looked down at Danny, his arms now wrapped around my leg. I could see his eyes watering. His bottom lip jutted out in that way it did when he was about to start bawling.Please God, don’t cry now, I thought. I crouched down, the jangling of the door handle getting faster, and pulled him in close.

“We’re going to be fine,” I said, trying to keep my tone flat, my eyes locked on his. “Mommy won’t let—”

“It’s Daddy,” he blurted out.

“What?”

“It’s Daddy,” Danny said, looking past me now, toward the door. “He’s here. He’s coming for me. He wants me b—”

A clicking. I felt a coldness cover every inch of my body. The bolt lock. Buthow?I wondered.