Lights Out (Book 3): Front Lines

by Cal, Sarah

  "Don’t you dare tell me that as if I'm not a part of this family! The problem you have is with me, isn’t it? There's no reason for you to take it out on grandmother. She hadn't done anything wrong."

  Merry looked at her blankly for a second, and then she was laughing. It was enough to startle Emma into stillness, but it wasn’t exactly a nice laugh. Actually, it sounded more than just a little broken, and just hearing it actually hurt.

  "Of course you would say that, Emma," she muttered, sarcastic. "Perfect Emma, who can never do wrong. So pure, so selfless, and too good for this world. The better sister, the sane one. The hard worker. I bet you're proud of yourself."

  Merry laughed some more, only it sounded like mad cackling to Emma. She could feel her face was flushed in her anger. Her body trembled a little, and she had her fists clenched at her sides.

  That wasn’t fair. She and Merry had already had this talk, and it wasn’t like her sister saw at all. Emma was self-centered, but then so was her sister, because Merry had failed to notice her misery for all these years. If anything, she had added to it, sometimes deliberately when she just wanted to be difficult.

  Emma would have rather have her sister back, but Merry had done her best to push both her and their grandmother away. Her sister had problems, but the two of them had had problems of their own, as well, and Merry never bothered with it then, so it was unfair of her to bring all this up now.

  She wasn’t done speaking yet, though, turning back to Janice. "You can say that all you want, but your actions tell a different story, and I finally see it now. I know you're just too soft hearted to ever say it to my face, but you don’t have to. I'll never be good enough, but whatever. I'm not good enough."

  With her parting shot, she gave them all a last glare and stormed upstairs.

  Janice was distraught, following Merry, probably to continue with the argument, but Emma did stand up that time. She reached her grandmother before she could make her way to the stairs. Emma could handle arguing with Merry, but she didn’t it would be okay if they let Janice do it. Her mental health was nowhere near stable enough to take something like that well. But then her heartbroken face was turned to Emma's, and she winced.

  "It's okay, grandma, but it will be impossible to speak to her right now. She isn’t going to take anyone invading her privacy very well, either. Maybe you should just let her cool down for now?"

  There was no need to let Janice and Merry meet again so soon, when Merry was still so quick to be on the defensive. It would only make things worse than they already are if Emma let them talk when what her sister was interested in was a confrontation. It would be better for everyone if she was left alone to get her head on straight first.

  "But I really need to talk to her and clear this up," Janice fretted. "I don’t want to take too long. I can't have her thinking I don’t appreciate her as my granddaughter. You are both my daughter's children, and I do love you both equally."

  "It's all right," she murmured, soothing the older woman, getting her to sit back down and rubbing her shoulders in comfort. "Right now wouldn’t be the best time to try to talk to her, anyway. She's too mad to think rationally. And it's not like you didn’t show us that you care, I think Merry just needs more attention to believe it."

  Janice nodded distractedly, glancing toward the stairs, before sighing and leaning back into the couch, looking like she'd aged a decade in that short moment.

  "Are you sure it will be okay?" she questioned, voice small.

  "I'm sure," Emma said with conviction. She'd had time to deal with her sister and her infamous moods. "It'll blow over in a few days," she insisted when Janice didn’t look like she believed her. "This happens all the time. Just give her some time. If she takes too long taking the first step, then you can talk to her, because at least then she would be calmed down."

  She nodded again, pulling in a deep breath and firming her lips. "All right. I'll give it a few days. But I think I'll be going back to my room, now."

  Emma wanted to follow her, but she probably wanted to be alone like Merry did in that moment. She let them have what they wanted.

  What she wanted to do on the other hand, was to go after Merry herself and make her see the error of her ways. Janice had been under a lot of stress lately, because of her condition and because of the attacks that had been happening. Emma wanted her to be able to relax, not to have something completely new to keep her worried, because it wasn’t good for her.

  But would Merry care if Emma went into her room without permission to tell her this? More than anything she would still be annoyed, and they would end up having a shouting match. The possibility of that, when Merry's room wasn’t that far from Janice, was the major reason why Emma didn’t move from where she stood.

  She knew she would talk to her sister before another argument started with their grandmother thrown in the middle of it. Merry might end up cooling down on her own, but she would still need someone to tell her what she had done wrong before she even entertained the idea.

  Her sister had been like that since a long time ago, for as long as Emma could remember, and it only got worse with her condition. Emma was really tempted to get her sister and beat some sense into her, but she was going to have to do it some other time. Going right then would only make her madder at Janice and Emma both.

  Emma and Chase went upstairs to her room, with nothing left to do in the living room, and Emma stared out the window. The wreckage of the car of the invaders was still outside. The pile of metal couldn’t even be recognizes as having one been a car, let alone one that actually ran.

  She wondered, idly, if they could have gotten all the women out of the vehicle without damaging it, if it could have been useful. Well, it should have been so they could have a further reach out of town when sent out on volunteer missions. But she had seen what cars could be used for, other than helping their town. They were the fastest means of transport, if they could be found, and with everyone else stronger, if gave them an advantage over whoever didn’t own a car.

  Her nose wrinkled. The attack that put cars and planes and all everything electrical out of commission might as well have pushed them back by decades. Those with cars could use them for nefarious purposes, considering all the times they had encountered people with vehicles, it hadn't ended up for them.

  There had been mayor Williams, a mayor in a neighboring town who sent a truck full of food for them—with food either bad or near there, and only a small portion of it safe enough to even feed people. Then there had been the women that attacked her street, and now this. If the world had been fair, all cars would have just shut down. Because this gave them a fighting chance, a good one, yet all people could think of was how to exploit it for their own gains.

  But the mass on their street was no longer usable, and Emma thought the police were still looking for some in their town. They didn’t have anything to move it with, and it would be too much trouble to have people do it by hand, but it was a symbol of what they'd been up against, what they'd survived once before.

  It made Emma paranoid that someone could make an attack on the house. It was closest to theirs, after all, and maybe someone would find it suspicious and they would be under attack again. She'd do her best to take care of it as before, of course, but still. It wouldn’t be that easy, not that she had any intention of just giving up and not doing anything.

  "Hey." Chase scared her, taking her by the tops of her arms and speaking directly in her ear. But then she was sighing and relaxing back into him, letting her eyes slide closed. "I think it's time we went to bed now. You can think about whatever is on your mind in the morning, can't you? You need to take care of yourself too, you know."

  "It's not that simple, Chase," she protested lightly, ignoring his coaxing and tensing her shoulders. "I just really hate all this, that things have to be this difficult. Why couldn’t we just have the time to relax for a little bit? We've earned it, haven't we?" she asked, unsure.

  What m
ore could they possibly go through before the world let them rest for more than a few days, if that, at a time. She would have loved to just drop in her bed and go to sleep without having to worry about getting any nightmares. The chances of that were looking grimmer as time went on.

  "You need to rest, Emma," Chase insisted softly.

  She shook her head stubbornly. "I can't when I'm not sure what could happen while I sleep."

  He sighed, tugging her carefully. She resisted a little, before doing as he said. It was still light, barely twilight outside, but she didn’t protest as he pushed her to get in the bed, under the covers, making no move to join her.

  "I promise to keep watch," he said. "So you don’t have to worry for the time being."

  He sat down beside her on the bed. She wanted to fight against it, but she was hit by sudden drowsiness. Or maybe it had been there, and she just hadn't noticed. She heard him murmur something, stroking her hair while she went to sleep.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Emma woke up with Chase sitting beside her, still on watch. She felt him there before she saw, though he'd stopped stroking her hair, her eyes blinking open. She didn’t move, not wanting him to know yet that she was awake.

  Emma lay still as her mind slowly booted up. She grimaced to herself as the memories from the previous day came back to her. Getting members of the town together for a discussion on what to do about the invaders and the longer than necessary meeting. Then there was going home to report everything to her family, only to have Merry start an argument.

  Her teeth clenched as anger flared for a moment. Emma had to do something about Merry. It wasn’t the first time she had thought that, and she had a feeling it would just exhaust her to actually try.

  Merry had been getting better, or so she thought. Part of her thought that parts of Merry were changing, and that worried her more than anything. Seeing her sister outside had scared her, seeing how she'd opened up a little and was talking to others around her more—when she wasn’t mentioning anything about visions and predictions—had given her some hope that her sister could get better.

  Last night made her question that thought. It could be that Merry's condition was just evolving. Considering both times she had been out, Emma had found her gathering disciples and preaching something to them. She had only heard part the first time, but Emma couldn't make heads or tails or what Merry was trying to accomplish, what message she was trying to get across, and how so many people could so easily pulled by her words.

  Emma remembered being out on patrol, and seeing Merry in the town square, in the middle of a crowd, just after she'd had a different disaster. There her sister was, the girl that had shunned her friends, and even her family to her extent, only they lived together so she couldn’t avoid them. She stood on top of a car, shouting to a crowd of people as they shouted at every word she said. Like they were starved people, and she'd told them she knew exactly what they had to do to meet their needs the easiest, fastest way possible.

  Whatever it was, Emma didn't buy into it. She was tempted to ask her sister what the talks had been about. Considering Emma had met her sister outside three times, she did wonder if there were other times when Merry had snuck out while Emma was off doing volunteer work. The two times they met had been later in the evening, bordering on curfew. But whatever her sister was up to, Emma ignored it because she didn’t want to get sucked into it. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life cleaning after her sister, especially when she did things on such large scale.

  Emma took a deep breath and let her body relax. She had been growing steadily tense as thoughts of Merry swarm around her mind.

  For the time being, she didn’t know what to do with her sister. She'd only met one person, well recently anyway, that had told her a bit more of Merry's condition. Carol's sister had been the one to help, after Emma asked Carol only to be told she couldn’t do anything, but knew someone that might. She had even been kind enough to prescribe pills for Merry to take that would help her some.

  Merry hated taking the medicine, but Emma could tell when she took it that it made her a little better. Her appetite was still poor, and she didn’t seem to care much about what she looked like, but she as calmer. Then she claimed the pills had some side effect that she didn't like, and got difficult about taking the pills. Emma was still making her take them for the moment, checking her pills every few days just to make sure a few of them were gone every time she checked. Sometimes, she even had Merry take the pill in front of her, and check to make sure she hadn't hidden it in her check or something.

  There was too much to think about when it came to her sister, too many worries. At one point, her worries for her sister's had even overshadowed her grandmother. Somehow, she had to look after them equally. And it occurred to her that she could almost understand how Janice had felt, when Merry had accused her of having Emma as her favorite.

  She sighed quietly. Why did she keep thinking of things that would only make her annoyed? She didn’t think she could go back to sleep, but neither was she ready to get up yet. Instead, she focused on the warm presence near her and let it calm her heart down.

  Still, she couldn’t fall asleep. Well, she would have felt worse about it if it wasn’t Chase sitting beside her. She remembered his promise to her, and she was both surprised and pleased at how he'd actually kept his words so strictly. When was the last time he had slept?

  He must have his own anxieties. Emma felt bad, momentarily, that she hadn't even thought about this before. Of course, Chase had things he worried about as well, and most of them seemed centered around her. How could she have forgotten to check up on her best friend, like she used to?

  Well, the world wasn’t exactly the same, and at some point, they would all have to change. Besides, it wasn’t like he didn’t tell her things, he just old her things that she thought were impossible. She wanted to offer as much help as she could, and while he stood by her in the end anyway, a lot of the times he was against it because he didn’t want her to push herself too much, or get into anything dangerous.

  Emma was so grateful for him, more than she could ever possibly say. That he could still sit here with her like this, when he was trying to reassure her, even after they'd argued before, pleased her greatly. They would probably have to talk about things at some point, but the opportunity hadn't presented itself.

  She missed how they used to do that. Back when everything was all right with the world, and Chase was just her best friend. They'd go out some times, but usually, he asked her to his place to watch one game or another. While Emma wasn’t so into sport, she had always gone just for the private time to get away from her responsibilities. They used to talk a lot about life, and Emma had found herself being honest with him about a lot of things she would never tell anyone else. It had drawn them closer, until they'd made the meet ups a routine thing. They hadn't had that in a while, and it was one of the many things she was learning to forget about that she didn’t want to.

  But Chase was here now. Everything was different, and she didn’t think they could talk as freely as they did before, but they were still close and she would let that be enough for her at the moment.

  She wanted to snuggle into him. His warmth was so tempting, and he was right there. But as soon as the thought entered her mind, she knew she couldn’t move. Chase held affections for her, and she didn’t have a definitive answer for him yet. She could always pretend she was still sleeping and move closer to him, but that wouldn’t be fair. To either of them. She wanted to, but she also didn’t want to lead him on.

  Sometime, when everything finally cooled down, she was going to have to come up with an answer for herself, and then decide whether or not she could tell him. Until then, they had too much on their plate to be thinking about any kind of relationship.

  But... what if she was just stalling, making excuses so she didn’t have to think about it? It wasn’t like she hadn't had time to think his final words on the matter over. He had given u
p on using leaving as an ultimatum for the time being, and currently neither of them was committed to anything so they wouldn’t get hurt. But they would have to at some point. It would be too awkward to go as they were, especially if Chase went back to using her room instead of sleeping on the couch, what he'd taken to doing since Brian cleared out.

  Could they even be happy, if they decided to try? It was dangerous to let themselves get too relaxed, so could a relationship in those kinds of conditions end up anywhere, anyway? Probably not. Then again, she was just making more excuses. If this was something she truly wanted, she would have gone for it already.

  Then again, she wasn’t exactly a normal person, so she didn’t always do what she would if her situation had been different. Once upon a time, it had been her dream to find a man to settle down with and start her own family. But all the people she ended up dating wouldn’t exactly be the kind of guys that would go for settling down, then she ended up in an affair with her married neighbor.

  The truth was, she was scared to be happy. She was okay with things as they were, with them being friends and Chase staying with them. Adding romance to a good friendship would only complicate things, and they were bad enough to begin with.

  But wasn’t that her just coming up with more excuses...?

  Stop thinking so much, she chided herself with a sigh, bringing up a hand to rub her face. She was only exhausting herself with trivial things that could come after their safety was assured. That was all she had to keep her focus on for the moment, instead of letting herself get side tracked because she was letting herself get sentimental. There was nothing she could do about the past, but if they were to have a future, she had to give this her all.

  When she looked up, it was to find Chase's eyes on her. Well, it was too late to keep pretending sleep, and Chase was probably tired himself. Besides, she did have other things to do than sleep, now that she'd made the decisions she had. They had to get things over with quickly before they got out of hand.