What Once We Feared Read Free Page B

refrigerator with the first fresh vegetables we’d had in days. She had only one picture frame on her dresser, and in it was a photo of her and another girl who looked just like her. Probably her sister.
    Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to find that sister. To have to confess that that woman was the first human being I’d ever purposefully hurt. She was the first I killed.
    And it was terrible and impossible.
    As I pressed the rail of the chair against her throat I realized that choking her was useless. Decapitation or destruction of the brain—that’s what we’d been told on the news were the only defenses. And yet, no matter how much weight I put behind it, even when I jumped, trying to add pressure, I couldn’t sever her neck. I couldn’t even crush her spinal cord.
    Nicky had pulled a groggy Gregor out of the way, and she cradled his head in her lap as she watched me try to kill this woman. “Oh God,” she moaned over and over again. Felipe had come back, and he pulled another chair from the billiard room to finally block off the second elevator. This time, Nicky didn’t protest or mention her dad.
    Beatrice stood down the hallway, already a dim ghost. I should have realized then that she’d jump, eventually. The first of us to give up.
    But not the last.
    I’d grown up with the assumption that the human body is fragile. It isn’t. “Give me a pool cue,” I said, holding out my hand. Nicky traded glances with Felipe, and I could tell she was about to ask why when he shook his head slightly, stopping her.
    He picked it up, held it out to me. It wasn’t easy to line up the tip of it against the woman’s eye. Her lids were open, the irises visible, and I didn’t want to see, but I had to.
    It took more force than I thought it would, and all the while the woman struggled, snapping her teeth at me. Terror clogged my throat, infiltrated my lungs like smoke. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t force my muscles to move the way they needed to.
    Her eyeball compressed but held firm. I tried using momentum but I was shaking too hard, and each time I tried to bring the tip of the pool cue down I missed the socket. Nicky was fully sobbing at this point and the elevator doors were still trying to close; their alarms screamed.
    “Just do it!” Nicky screeched.
    And I did. Letting go of the chair, I wrapped both hands around the pool cue and I jammed it into the dead woman’s eye with all the force of my body weight and then some. There was a sickening pop that I felt more than heard as the tip of the cue jerked down, sinking through the bone of her orbital socket and then her brain.
    The woman choked out one last moan as I twisted the cue, moving it back and forth like it was a shovel loosening dirt.
    I know there was still sound, but in my head there was silence. A soft, stuffy kind like you see on TV when a character’s hearing goes out after an explosion. Everyone else sat stunned, staring at me.
    Maybe I expected to see some sort of admiration. A moment of unity that we’re all in this together—that it wasn’t me alone who’d killed this woman, but me acting on behalf of a team.
    Except that wasn’t what I found. I knew they were grateful. I knew they understood that I’d saved their lives. But that couldn’t keep the horror from their eyes. The disgust.
    Later they’d rally around me and Felipe would start joking about it. And once, when wepried open the door to the neighbor’s wine closet, he and Gregor would act it all out again and we’d laugh (Beatrice would already be gone by then).
    But in that moment there was just a sound-softened silence. All of them staring at me like
I
was the monster.
    “Help me get him up,” Nicky finally murmured to Felipe, and together they helped Gregor to his feet. A thin trickle of blood smeared the back of his neck, and it took him a minute to become steady.
    We left the woman in the little vestibule by the elevators for the time being.