EASTON

SUNDAY

10:37 AM

37 HOURS, 23 MINUTES UNTIL DEADLINE

It didn't make any sense, and yet Erin Green was standing right in front of him.

The unconscious and possibly dead bodies of his sister and friends were surrounding his feet, and in front of his face stood a woman that he had assumed was dead. A woman who, by all reports and documents and records, was dead.

But Erin Green was very much alive.

Ironically, she was the one out of the four older siblings who Michael hadn't mourned. He was rather alright with her death—after all, he had tried to make it happen months earlier than it actually did.

Seeing Erin alive did give Michael a bit of comfort about the state of his sister and friends—Erin wouldn't have killed her own brother for no reason, which most likely meant no one else was dead.

"Stop standing there with your mouth wide open, you look like a pufferfish." Erin ordered. Michael shut his mouth so quickly that his teeth clanged together and he massaged his jaw carefully before deciding to speak.

"Are you gonna explain why you're alive, or am I supposed to guess?'

Erin rolled her eyes.

"Always the smart aleck. I should have done to you what I did to the rest of them. Or rather, what Nathan and I did to the rest of them."

A man stepped out from the shadows behind Erin, his face illuminated by the light bulb swinging above their heads. Michael squinted carefully: the man looked strangely familiar, but he couldn't quite place where he knew him from.

"Now you have a choice to make, Michael." Erin grinned, "Your friends are going to wake up soon, and they're going to wonder what happened while they were unconscious. Now you can try to convince them that I'm alive...which, I mean, good luck...or you can tell them that you saw Nathan, and no one else, and that the only way for these four to survive is if you die."

"You're the reason that Jordan was ordered to kill me?" Michael scoffed, "Come on, Erin. You have to get over me trying to stab you; it was a one-time thing."

Erin raised her eyebrows.

"There is so much going on here that you don't know about, Hadden. Your brother had secrets that you don't know about, and you never will. I—" she turned slightly to glance at the man, Nathan, behind her, "—I had to make sacrifices to survive that car crash. And now you're going to make a sacrifice to ensure that four more people don't have to die."

"Why does anyone have to die?" Michael exclaimed in a mixture of confusion and annoyance, "I don't see why we can't all just go home and live our lives like normal human beings."

"Well, I'm technically dead, so there's one reason." Erin replied stiffly, "And maybe another reason could be that...oh, yeah. Nathan has all of our lives in his hands."

"Yeah so who the hell are you?" Michael turned his attention from Erin to Nathan, "I don't even know who you are, so why are you torturing us?"

"Because you don't even know who I am." Nathan shrugged, "And that's the entire problem."

Michael wasn't going to comment on how that made absolutely zero sense, since this was a man who apparently had the ability to kill anyone he wanted, so he stood in silence until Erin reached above her head to tug on the string hanging from the single lightbulb.

"Lights out, Michael."

The room went completely dark again before Michael felt a sting on the side of his neck and he dropped to the ground.

***

"Michael? Michael, get up."

Michael blinked his eyes open to see Mary standing above him, shaking him softly as the other three teens milled around behind them. He sat up slowly, looking around the room.

"What happened?"

Mary shrugged.

"I woke up on the ground and everyone else was already awake except for you. I think we're still in the cabin, but no one else is here. We missed our chance to see the stalker."

Michael's head began to whirl as the memories of Erin appearing with a man named Nathan came back to his consciousness.

"Mary, I have to tell you something, and it's going to sound crazy, but—"

"Guys, I think we need to go." Roland said as he stared out the window of the cabin, "A cop car just pulled up."

"Ten bucks says it's Barlow." Mary rolled her eyes as she pulled Michael up to his feet, "You can tell me in the car, okay?"

Michael nodded slowly as the five exited the cabin and walked up to their car, ignoring the police officer who stepped out of the car and headed in their direction.

"It's Barlow." Lindsey muttered as they opened the doors to Michael's car, "Go."

Mary hopped in the driver's seat and the rest of the teens piled into wherever they could fit as Barlow approached the car. Mary turned on the engine and put the car into drive as the officer could be heard shouting at them.

"What do you think you're doing out here? What's going on?"

But Mary was already speeding off, leaving Barlow standing by himself in front of a terribly decrepit cabin.

"Maybe he'll find the secret room." Michael muttered from the passenger's side.

"What secret room?" Lindsey asked.

"There's this secret room in the cabin. It's like completely dark and there's only one lightbulb. Roland was there, he saw it."

"I don't know what you're talking about, man." Roland shook his head, "All I remember is running after you and then passing out."

Michael raised his eyebrows and turned around.

"Really? But you were in the room with me."

Roland shrugged.

"I don't remember it."

"Is that what you had to tell me, Michael?" Mary asked, "About a secret room?"

Michael shook his head.

"No. You guys aren't going to believe this, but I swear it happened."

"Spill." Jordan ordered.

"Erin's alive." Michael revealed, "Like...I talked to her."

The car was silent and Michael wasn't sure why they weren't reacting.

"Did you guys hear me? I said that Erin's al—"

"We heard you, Michael." Mary interrupted, nodding as her eyes remined trained on the road in front of her, "I just don't know if I believe that."

Michael shook his head, feeling himself become desperate to prove it.

"I swear she's alive. She even told me that no one would believe me! But I know she's alive, she showed me a man, Nathan, and—"

"Michael, you're still recovering from a concussion." Jordan said sympathetically, "It's okay if you're hallucinating a little bit."

"I'm not hallucinating!"

"Calm down." Mary ordered, "It's not good for you to get riled up." She glanced over in concern for a moment, "Take a deep breath and really think about it. Could this honestly have been something you imagined?"

Michael consciously forced himself to calm down and reflect. He closed his eyes and laid his head back, thinking deeply. The exchange had felt so real. It had felt so real. Erin had been standing in front of him, completely alive. She had introduced him to Nathan, who had looked so real. And so familiar.

But maybe it had been a manifestation of the guilt he felt every night when he went to sleep. The guilt he felt at having wished death on someone who had died in such a horrific way just a few months later.

It made sense that he had imagined it. That he had been knocked out in the same way as his friends and that he had hallucinated as a side effect of his lingering concussion.

"Maybe I imagined it." Michael nodded, opening his eyes. "Maybe I imagined it."

Maybe he imagined it.

Or, in a much more real sense, maybe Erin and the familiar man were very much alive.

A/N: She alive. She aliveeeeee.

Remember that new chapters are ALWAYS up early on Radish Fiction, so be sure to download the app to read ahead!

Also, it's offically November! Who's doing Nanowrimo??

-Katherine