Midnight Disaster ~FINALIST Watty Awards 2012~

Chapter 22 (Revised 4/25/2019)

The figures were hulking and horrifying. They hadn't moved, and that made it all somehow so much worse. One of the figures had the same buzzed haircut that Miles did, both of them adorned with transparent faces that revealed the veins underneath. The other figure had shoulder-length hair but other than that, they mirrored the horror of one another.

As if on silent cue, they lunged toward us at the same time, the creature with the shoulder-length hair banging on the window beside Clarissa. With a gasp, she turned toward the sound. Upon seeing the alien on the other side of the glass, she screamed.

"Clarissa, start the car!" Cameron shouted at her.

Clarissa did not move, panic overtaking her to the point that her body was useless.

Cameron sprung into action, letting go of me enough to wedge himself between the two front seats. He grabbed her arm, and she turned to look at him with a silent scream. "Drive!"

She nodded, fingers shaking as she fumbled with her keys finally finding the right one to stick in the ignition. It spluttered to life, and Clarissa wasted no time flooring it down the street, past the two hungry aliens. I was both surprised and disappointed that she hadn't at least clipped one of them in the get away.

Cameron shook beside me, arm tightening around my shoulders. "My mother and Fiona. I have to know if they're okay," he said.

I didn't hesitate reaching into my pocket to hand him my phone. Grateful hint of a smile on his face, he took it and punched in a few numbers before closing it with a sigh. "Now we wait," he said, setting it on his thigh where the dark screen would be in full sight if it were to light up with a text or a call.

As Clarissa drove, the phone did not light up with any notifications, and the longer the suspense stretched on, the more anxious Cameron became. A choking noise rattled from his chest as he scooped up the phone, punching in another number. "I'm not good at waiting," he said and held it to his ear. The empty ring echoed around the car, but he received no answer. Despair clouded his eyes, heavy in his movements, as he tried to punch the number in again and still received nothing in response. "They're not answering," he said at last.

"They...they'll be okay," I said, wincing at my own words, and not knowing why I said them. After the scene with Lilliana and Cory, it was very hard to believe that anyone could truly be okay.

"How do you know?" Cameron demanded with an edge to his tone that I wasn't used to having directed at me.

"I don't, but if they're here, then I doubt they could've made it all the way across town yet."

"Unless there's more of them," he said, echoing one of my previous thoughts.

I squeezed my eyes shut. It was hard to combat my own thoughts, and I had no idea how to do so.

"How much farther until the community center?" I asked Clarissa instead.

Her eyes narrowed through the rearview mirror. "Why should we go there? Wouldn't it make sense to keep driving, to find a new town, and get help?"

I swallowed, feeling the indecision stick in my throat like a piece of caramel candy, not enough to choke me, but enough to make it impossible to focus on anything else. "We don't know how far this thing has spread," I point out. "If...if there are more of them..."

Clarissa sighed, licking her lips as her eyes darted back to the road. "Then we're fucked either way," she said, finishing my sentence in much less of a graceful manner than I had planned.

I closed my eyes, burying my face in my hands. Slowly, but surely, it was all becoming too much. It was as if the gravity of the situation hadn't truly hit me until that moment, and now that it had, I was sinking in it.

"I'm sorry," Cameron said in my ear.

My face shot up to look at him, at the pinched pain across his face. "For what?"

"For suggesting we ever go alien-hunting," he said, reaching up to subtly wipe a glistening tear off his cheek.

"Cameron, you can't blame yourself for this...any of it. You didn't know we'd find an alien...and you certainly didn't know that if we did it would turn out to eat people."

He shrugged. "I feel bad for being pushy. You said no, you put your foot down, but I insisted and now..."

"Now a pity party isn't going to help any of us," Clarissa said, frowning at Cameron through the rearview mirror. "What's done is done." I don't think she meant for me to see the split-second glance she sent to the empty passenger seat, but I did anyway, and my heart twisted in a new kind of agony.

Clarissa was channeling her pain into anger. That wasn't the way she usually handled her emotions, but now, even she was backed into a corner, unsure of how to move on from this night...hell, this moment.

"You're right," Cameron said to her, face pulling tight though the despair was still clear enough in his eyes that it hurt to look at him.

The look on his face, the certainty that this was all our fault, made me think thoughts I didn't want to consider. For example—had Miles' friends killed Lilliana because they traced his scent back there and assumed she had harmed him because he had been nowhere in sight?

That caused twin tears to run down my face, and I rolled my eyes up toward the roof of the car, trying to make them stop without making it obvious that I was crying. Cameron glanced at me sideways, and I held my breath, waiting, but he said nothing, just pulled me into another tight hug.

I buried my face in his chest, letting the moment overcome me until Cameron's voice broke me out.

"I think we know what caused this," he said.

"Huh?" I asked, turning my head.

Cameron's eyes were focused on the full moon, the light unobscured by the clouds that had hidden it only an hour prior.

"Do you really think the moon caused this?"

"I don't know what else it could've been. Unless of course, this was the plan all along."

I said nothing because that thought made so much sense that it hurt to think we never considered it as a possibility before now.