as if she weighed nothing – adrenaline, his sturdy build, and her petite size. Out into the night they emerged, but not into the orange glow of a blazing fire as Zoey had expected to see. Instead, as Chad carried her without a word toward the Explorer parked at the end of the driveway, she saw exactly what she had seen before all of the screaming and blood had begun: the tool shed and the barn, both just worn, burnt, barely-there remains of the structures they had once been, now mostly hidden with weeds.
Chad finally set her down upon her feet, allowing her to lean back against the rear passenger-side door of the Explorer as he dug out his keys. “They're dead, Zoey. Gina and Mike are dead. I don't know what the hell that black misty-looking thing was, but it killed them both.”
“The farmer,” she replied wearily, so exhausted that she felt almost drugged at that point.
“The what?”
“The farmer … entity … thing…”
“Look, I don't know what it is, and I don't care. Whatever it is, we made it mad, and we've gotta get out of here,” he said, unlocking the front passenger-side door and yanking it open. “C'mon, I'll help you.”
Chad didn't just help her inside. He scooped her up into his arms and placed her inside the Ford, for whatever reason taking the time to fasten her seat belt for her. Even in a panic, he cared for her. Zoey was still trying to regain her bearings, still looking around in a dazed state as she struggled to make sense of how things had so drastically changed outside since the start of this living nightmare. Chad wasn't even stopping to think, nor was he apparently trying to understand. Perhaps the wiser of the two of them, he was instead just choosing to react, to deal with the situation immediately as best he knew how. He hopped into the driver's seat, slammed the door shut, cranked the engine, and jerked the gearshift into Drive at the same time as he stomped on the accelerator. The Ford revved for an instant before the automatic transmission caught it a muted bang – that couldn't have been good for it – and the SUV lunged forward with a jerk, tires spinning in the dirt.
And it was only then, only when it was already too late, that Zoey realized that she had just made one more terrible mistake. She should have stopped him. She should have warned him. For crying out loud, why hadn't she told him about this part? And if she had, then why hadn't she made it more clear to him? They flew up the winding, worn, and overgrown driveway, sailing over the bumps with reckless abandon as the Explorer's suspension clunked and heaved to try to accommodate the terrain, the engine screaming up through first gear and into second.
“Chad! Chad, stop!” she cried. “Stop the car! Please, stop!”
“Stop? Stop for what? We've gotta get out of here!” he responded, jerking the wheel to the right. The Explorer slid, skipped, and pitched hard to the right, feeling almost as if its passenger-side wheels had left the ground completely, and then it settled back down harshly as he straightened the fishtailing SUV out upon the dirt road. He stomped back down upon the throttle and the Explorer regained traction, surging forward to the north toward the highway from whence they had come.
“You don't understand! This happened before!” Zoey warned him loudly. “Please, just stop the…”
She saw it out of the corner of her eye, even before Chad did, whose attention had momentarily been drawn toward her as she'd been making her futile attempt to explain the threat. She saw it, she gasped, and Chad must have seen it with his peripheral vision, because he cursed and yanked the wheel with both hands hard to the left, too hard, then jerked it in the opposite direction as they headed for the ditch, too sudden, and with too much correction. He was trying to avoid the German farmer with the black holes for eyes that came running out into the road in front of them … the same mistake that Zach had made ten years before.
Once again, the Explorer turned, slid, and skipped, but this time it pitched over violently, starting a terrible roll at over forty-five miles per hour. Zoey managed to brace her hands upon the roof, and the seat belt Chad had snapped into place drew painfully tight across her chest and waistline, holding her fast within the seat. Chad let out a brief yell that was abruptly cut off, and for a few moments, Zoey just closed her eyes and rode out the wreck. When the Ford finally stopped moving, it was resting upon its passenger-side flank, gravity pinning Zoey against her door. She had already been quite soaked by the cold waters of the cellar, but she became aware of a new wetness that was raining down upon her left arm and cheek in a few steady dribbles. She blinked up at it, looking over to what had once been the driver's side of the vehicle. Chad had been in such a hurry that he hadn't buckled himself in. The rollover had shattered all of the windows, and he had bounced halfway out of the cabin before being pinched apart at the middle between the SUV's roof and the ground. What was dribbling all over her now, hot and coppery-scented, was coming from what remained of the lower half of her boyfriend.
Zoey wanted to scream. She wanted to just come apart at the seams, to completely let go of every last shred that remained of her sanity. She had seen, felt, heard, and experienced just far, far too much to even begin to process. She couldn't even begin to wrap her head around it all. Consciously, she was fully aware of everything that had happened. Physiologically, her body was still trying to catch up, her pain receptors gradually reporting in with sensations to let her know just how badly she had been hurt by this whole ordeal. But emotionally, she was just stuck. Something had snapped up there. Something had just gone kaput. Maybe it was temporary, or maybe that was it, maybe she really was broken. She was alive, at least in the clinical sense, but emotionally, psychologically … what was left? She didn't know where to even begin.
Moving as if she was acting upon a rehearsed script that only her body knew, Zoey calmly and quietly unlatched the buckle of her safety belt, shrugged out of it, and then crawled out of the opening that had once been the windshield of the Ford. There were bits of glass and such on the ground, things that dug into and cut into her hands slightly. She didn't really seem to care. She stood up and briefly looked around to regain her sense of direction. She caught a glimpse of the mangled remains that were the rest of Chad, approximately fifty feet away in the road. It registered as a fact, but not so much a feeling in her mind. She started walking back toward the house, limping moderately only because her ankle was damaged enough that there was some physical impairment to its movement. The pain was still there, but not really a bother now, again something that registered in her brain as data but did nothing to affect her actions.
Zoey, or rather what was left of her, lazily made her way back up the driveway, up the stairs, and in through the opening that led into the kitchen. Without looking, she stepped upon the door that was laid over the hole in the floor, somehow just knowing that it would be there this time, and she made her way through the kitchen, the dining room, and then the living room, turning and heading up the stairs to the second floor.
The scene was exactly as she had somehow expected to find it. Gina's body was sprawled out upon the floor very close to the same place where the chalk outline had been. A bright red pool of blood surrounded her, made all the more vivid by the light of the kerosene lantern that continued to burn. She had been stabbed countless times in the chest and neck, and the means of her demise had been left buried in her chest: the athame that Zoey had used to cast the circle at the start of the ceremony. The sheet of plywood that had been nailed over the broken window of the bedroom had somehow been ripped off and cast aside. Zoey stepped into the room, leaned partially out of the shattered window, and looked down, barely able to see the outline of Mike's crumpled body laying in an awkward position below.
It was a near-perfect repeat. Nearly perfect … but not quite. She was still alive. She had survived this once again. Had it been because the entity causing this had run out of energy? Had it only wanted to claim three lives this time instead of four? Did it find her soul to be unappealing enough that it did not wish to claim her?
No, that didn't make sense. The only possibility that occurred to Zoey as s
he stood there, still completely numb and broken in a bizarre state of shock and loss, was that the entity had needed her. And that's what it was, she had decided: an entity, a conscious, intelligent force of some kind, not quite a demon nor a spirit, but some other sort of entity. Whatever it was, it thrived upon sorrow, pain, terror, and death, and for reasons she could only guess – energy, sadism, hunger, curiosity, or something else. And it had used her twice now as a means to achieve its goals.
Without her, it could not have satisfied its urge to terrify, to torment, to break, and to kill. She hadn't needed to do these things with her own hands, nor had it forced her to commit those acts. All she had needed to do was bring these people here. She had brought her brother here, and it had killed him, but that hadn't been enough – just one life, and a young one at that. This time, she had brought three more, young yet somewhat mature souls – perfectly ripe, full of life, full of energy and will. One plus three equaled four. And four was apparently the number that it always preferred.
The German family. The hippies. Her brother plus her friends. Four, four, and four, a nice even number, just like