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While a chill of greedy shock might have overtaken his body in the initial wake of facing whatever that thing is out there—whatever thing he has no certain name or reason to attach to yet—he is certain of what he saw it do, certain it skewered clean through most of Evan’s vital organs, leaving bloody holes poked through the length of the man.

Next to him, Ashley grips his shoulder with a shocking strength. “You have to go back out there,” she tells him, though Thomas can’t take his eyes off all the bloodstains in the dirt. He saw the life drain from Evan’s eyes, giving way to the stars overhead. He heard the man gasping for air.

He stopped choking, Thomas thinks, blinking to see if all the blood on the ground might somehow vanish and force it all to make sense. He went dead quiet in those woods.

But Thomas blinks again, and the blood is still there; it is even still splattered across his own shirt from standing too close to the kill zone.

Ashley turns and grabs Jackson then, shaking him with wild, pleading eyes. “Jackson, please. We can’t just leave him out there in the dark,” she says. “He’s hurt and needs help. I know I can help him, but—” She pauses, then looks down at her pregnant belly like it’s a coffee stain she can’t get out. “Please, if you could just go get him. Just bring him back here to me. Please.” Her words catch on a cry that she swallows down in a painful-looking gulp.

At Jackson’s stone-still stance, her legs buckle, leaving her swaying like a tree being felled. “Evan,” she cries into her hands, until Jane carefully wraps an arm around the woman’s shoulders and pulls her away from the doors.

Kimi motions them forward, tugging a stool out from behind the cashier counter for the woman to sit down on. Kimi grabs an apple juice from the nearby beverage fridge. “Sip this,” she tells Ashley, practically forcing it into the woman’s hands. “You have to calm down,” she adds quietly, daring a glance at the very full baby bump.

Ashley’s hands tremble as she sips the juice, staring straight ahead as low moans continue to sound from outside. Jane rubs a soothing hand on the woman’s back and looks up at Thomas, scared and expectant.

“What do we do?” she asks, as if maybe now that everyone is ready for a good cry, he’ll somehow have all the magic answers. Cassie’s earlier words come to mind, bubbling up like indigestion.

You’re her hero.

But how could that possibly be true? No part of him wants to go outside again to try to help Evan, to try to help that ridiculously nice man wearing an even more ridiculous puffer vest, whose pregnant wife has been left to fall apart. Thomas grips his ruined arm hard, something he has started to do when the room around him feels like it’s slipping out of focus.

He tries closing his eyes, but all he can see is that thing staring back at him, cloaked in hungry darkness.

He hangs his forehead against the glass and forces himself to inhale and exhale deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth. “I don’t think it really matters if we have a gun. A shot to the chest didn’t stop it,” he says quietly, pushing down the scream clawing at his throat as Evan’s choking rings through his ears again, followed by that brief, horrible silence. Thomas closes his eyes, exhaling another trembling breath. “Whatever is out there—I don’t think we stand much of a chance against it.”

A hearty laugh escapes from Jim where he sits on the floor with his legs splayed out like a child at story time. His eyes are pinned to Billy’s lifeless body, a gnarly sight of flesh and sinew that has somehow escaped all of their collective mental capacity.

“I told you sons of bitches,” Jim mumbles, nodding at nothing with a sharp curve to his lip. “None of y’all wanted to listen to me. Now look at you, beggin’ and cryin’.” He cuts a sneer at Ashley’s wet face, then to where Thomas stands at the door with his knuckles clenched white.

“All that cryin’ outside?” he continues in a voice like he’d swallowed gravel. “That ain’t nothing but the sound of your choice, boy.”

The words are land mines set across the stretch of linoleum between them, and it takes everything in Thomas not to run headlong through them.

Kimi maneuvers silently, pausing only a foot in front of him. Her dark eyes seize control over his focus like a shot of espresso. “Maybe you didn’t shoot it enough,” she says.

Her black hair keeps slipping into her face, and she huffs in exasperation as she tugs it back into a haphazard ponytail. “You guys only got one shot on it,” she adds, and the intensity in her eyes is slightly disarming, like he is somehow to blame for this night turned nightmare incarnate.

He clenches his jaw, weary of feeling like a bug under a microscope. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember seeing you out there trying to help us.”

Kimi’s eyes narrow. “Well, you seemed to run away just fine on your own—”

“There was nothing else we could do,” Jackson says. He gently nudges the cashier where her shoulders have hitched up like a snake primed for attack. “I could unload the whole barrel into that thing and I don’t think it would stop it. Slow it down, maybe, but not stop it.” Winnie moves with him like a shadow, keeping a paw atop his hiking boots each time he halts.

“So we shoot it with everything we’ve got, then. The bullets could keep it down just long enough to get Evan back,” Kimi tells them before looking back over her shoulder to where Ashley sits beneath Jane’s arm, looking more and more like a ghost than a thirtysomething woman.

Thomas glances sidelong at Jackson. With one glimpse, he can tell the guy feels as wafer thin as him, barely standing on two coherent feet. Going out into the cold night of the mountain might as well be going in front of the firing squad.

Jackson at least offers the courtesy of pretending to be mulling Kimi’s idea over, or rather trying to find a polite way to say no way in hell. Then his eyes widen. “The extra shells,” he realizes, looking out toward the black night. “I gave Evan the box of extra shells when we were at the truck. Outside.”

Next to Ashley, Jane straightens from her doting, hunched-over position. “Wait. So you’re saying that—”

“That the only bullets we have are what’s currently in the gun.”

Thomas jerks his left fist out, banging it against the nearby wall. There’s an answering throb in his knuckles pounding in time with his heart, and he feels ready to scream his lungs raw as another pained cry calls desperately from outside.

He had stood front row as Evan was handled like he was nothing more than a flimsy doll, and now the man’s torment is crystalline, ringing out across the parking lot in steady competition with the call of a nearby owl.

Ashley uses her shirt collar to wipe beneath her puffy eyes, where black streaks of mascara have run wild. “We can’t just sit here and do nothing,” she says.