Page 34 of The Midnight Knock

ASHRIEKtore through the night. It almost sounded like a laugh.

“You’re wasting time,” Thomas said.

Tabitha watched them, silent, long enough for Thomas to glance at her.

Whatever her brother expected Tabitha to say, it wasn’t this:

“You’re asking the wrong questions,” she finally said. “Just like the last guests.”

Thomas blinked, incredulous.

“The last guests?” Ethan stared at her. It took everything in him to say, “Y’all… y’all have done this before? To other people?”

Tabitha said, “Yes, Mister Cross. Many, many times.”

She held out a pair of keys. Ethan took them numbly, barely registering their numbers.

“I hope you’re luckier than the last ones,” Tabitha said.

She shut the door.

A bolt slid into place.

Then silence.

TIME FLIESETHAN

9:00 p.m.

Ethan followed Hunter down the front porch. He was freezing. He was hungry. He was frightened to the root of his soul.

And yet when they passed the open door of room 4, Ethan hesitated. Sarah’s room. The scene of the crime.

Hunter just kept walking, and Ethan’s first instinct—his second, third, his twentieth—was to follow the man, go to their room, hide under the covers or under the bed or maybe just take himself out with the help of a firearm before whatever was waiting in the desert could tear him, very slowly, from limb to limb. Ethan wasn’t cut out for whatever this night had in store for them. He wasn’t built for this.

But still: he hesitated at room 4.

Hunter looked back. “We need to get busy. If we start now, we can have our room barricaded by midnight. Whatever the twins have planned, we can deal with it.”

In the direction of the road, Ethan could still hear the soft wet whispers of flesh being eaten. “Do you really think we have a shot of surviving those things if the lights go out?”

Fernanda and Kyla had joined them on the porch. Kyla leaned against a wall, looking like she was barely keeping herself upright. “Who says the lights will even go out at midnight? If the twins are just planning to flip a switch somewhere, we can stop them, we can—”

As if the motel itself was laughing at her, the ring of lights flickered. It was a soft stutter, so subtle Ethan was tempted to tell himself he’d imagined it. All night long, the distant rumble of a generator’s engine had made up the texture of the motel’s ambience, part of the background noise Ethan had quickly stopped hearing, but when thoselights stuttered, there was a change in the distant engine’s sound. It hitched, ever so slightly.

Ethan knew engines. He knew what that noise meant. “The generator’s running out of fuel.”

Kyla said, “Oh God.”

Fernanda stepped past Ethan, pushing open the door of room 5—it registered as strange, way down in his brain, that the girls’ door would be unlocked—and gestured for Kyla. “I do not know what is happening. I do not know what is coming. But we are not safe outside.”

Hunter nodded his agreement. He coughed, thumped his chest, took another step down the porch. Spitting out a mouthful of bloody phlegm, he said, “Let’s go.”

Kyla said, “Shouldn’t we at leasttryto figure out what happened to Sarah?”

“Why?” Hunter said. “Why should we have any reason to think the twins plan to help us? You heard Tabitha—this isn’t the first time they’ve done this. They’re playing some sort of game. Evenifthey have some kind of bunker, and evenifthey have a way to keep us safe, we could still bring Sarah’s killer to them on a silver platter, and they could still leave us out in the cold. First rule of survival: don’t play by other people’s rules.”

Ethan thought back over the strange ultimatum the twins had made in the office. Had it felt… off? Yes. Staged. Performative. Like everything else about them. But did that necessarily mean they were lying?