Surprisingly, it didn’t take us long to pack, and since it was pitch dark out when we’d finished, we decided to catch some sleep until daybreak, leaving all of our bags by the door in the kitchen that led to the garage. Both of us had a difficult time sleeping; it was cold inside our house with the heat not running. Not that I felt it, a fact I decided to keep to myself and just pretend that I felt the same chill in the house he did. We burned up the last of the firewood Dad had cut and stacked by the back porch while we huddled together on the sofa under all the blankets in the house. What kept me up, though, was the flashbacks of standing out in the rain, literally devouring the lightning.
"I'm afraid to go to sleep," Mason mumbled to me.
"Why? Everything's okay. We'll find a place to hole up for a while." I tried to be reassuring.
"It's not that. I'm afraid if I go to sleep because, when I wake up, you might be dead. No one gets struck by lightning without injury; you could be bleeding inside your brain or have permanent brain damage. We don't have a hospital you can go to and if you die, Kylie, I won't survive." He whispered the last part.
Patting his arm, I spoke confidently, like Mom always did when we were worried about things, "Mase, I'm fine. I can't explain what happened outside, but I can promise that I feel better than I ever have in my life and that I am not going to die because of the lightning. It’s odd, like everything else that's happened to us, but hey, we've survived the attack, or whatever it was that made everyone disappear. Being the only survivors has affected us in ways we haven’t a clue about yet. We're alive and will stay alive. That's all that matters right now. Okay?" He nodded while closing his weary eyes and drifted off to sleep.