“We have to go,” he says.

Lynell looks down at her hands. They’re red, Eric’s blood mingling with her own. Her stomach turns over again when a few drops fall from her fingers, loosened from her shaking hands.

Instinctively, she looks back at Eric.

He doesn’t move.

“He’s dead,” Ramsey says.

Her heart slams against her chest with rising panic.

“Let’s go,” Ramsey says, pulling Lynell away from the carnage and toward the door. Prickling numbness starts at her scalp and washes down her body, making her legs feel disconnected and arms heavy.

Words fail her, but Lynell doesn’t fight Ramsey as he leads her. Everything is a blur as they rush through the house and out a door that leads them outside. The bright late morning light slaps her in the face and makes her wince. The cool morning air brushes her arms, and goosebumps rise on her skin. Gravel crunches under their feet as they turn the corner. Every sound is simultaneously magnified and muffled and her head swims as she tries to make sense of everything.

Her body tenses as she notices a car, but as soon as she can make out Hayes in the driver’s seat, she relaxes. Ramsey helps her into the front seat and then climbs in the back before they take off.

Safely in the car, Lynell can speak at last. “But why are we running? I’m in charge now.”

“They don’t all know that yet,” Ramsey says. “Some are blind, loyal brutes.”

Lynell nods, staring out the front windshield. Her head feels foggy and her vision dark. She feels Eric’s blood on her hands, infecting her every crevice. Any panic she had managed to control slips free again, and her breathing returns to shallow panting. Hayes reaches over and grabs her forearm. She feels the pain but doesn’t pull away. Instead, she follows his arm with her eyes, until she meets his gaze.

“Hey, hey, Ms. Elysian, slow, deep breaths,” he says.

“I killed him.” The words are dry ice shoved down her throat, scorching everywhere it touches and filling her with frigid mist.

“You didn’t,” Ramsey says from the back seat.

“I stabbed him.”

“Your stab wouldn’t have killed him. I shot him. Twice. Once in the heart. All you did was defend yourself.”

“He was a monster,” Hayes says.

“He’s dead.” Despite running from her own demise for fourteen days, death has never felt so palpable.

The car is filled only with the sounds of Lynell’s labored breathing and Ramsey’s twitching leg in the back seat.

“Where are we going?” Lynell asks.

“The hospital,” Hayes says.

Lynell doesn’t recognize the relief that washes through her.

Her mom died at the hospital. Lynell woke up with Elizabeth struggling to breathe in her bed. Lynell screamed for Alan. He called the ambulance and Lynell rode along, holding her mom’s frail hand the whole way.

She sat next to her mom’s bed, crying while smiling at the face that used to be so young and smooth and full of joy.