Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

But Mark only looks through her.

  I prep the injection, calculating the dosage to account for the sleeping pills I gave him earlier tonight, and push it into his IV. It only takes about twenty seconds for his pounding heart to work the medication through his body.

  Finally, he goes limp underneath Brenna’s touch and his eyes close.

  “Help me move him back to bed,” Brenna says.

  She grips at his shoulders, and I take his feet. Mark’s heavy as a corpse as we move him back into bed. Without having to say a word to each other, we both silently fasten the straps around his wrists and ankles.

  For his own protection, I tell myself.

  Day 2

  Tobias

  Jasmine stares me down with those huge brown eyes of hers, and I find myself meekly ducking my head behind a beam in the stables to break our eye contact. I know she’s just a horse—of course I know that—but sometimes it feels like they’re able to read me better than actual people can.

  Julie whickers in her stall opposite Jasmine, and I decide a brush down would be a welcome distraction. I learned a long time ago that you have to accept the things you can’t change, and I can’t change anything about being locked down at Granfield for the foreseeable future. I can’t change the fact that I went to check on Mark right after the alert came across my phone, or that I let him convince me in that way he has to carry him out of his bed and onto the balcony closest to his rooms.

  “I want to see the sky,” he told me.

  The brushes fit perfectly into my hands, and the leather strap that circles around my palm is worn from years of good use.

  I take Jasmine out first, starting on her right shoulder and moving along her flank, and then on to her left side. She’s stoic, staring out into the field beyond the stables. I slept deeply last night. So deeply that I woke up in the morning and had to pause for a second to remember where I was, and what I needed to do. I thought the adrenaline pumping through my body, urging me to take off running into the woods, would keep me up.

  But it didn’t.

  I could never leave anyway. No one else besides Mark really knows how to take care of the horses, and he can’t anymore. All they have is me now.

  Brenna would come to ride them, sometimes, but she never showed any interest beyond getting up and down from the saddle. She always left the clean-up for me, which is fine. That’s my job, after all. Daphne seems to be really curious about them, but she won’t ride them yet. She’s still a little too nervous to climb up, even onto Julie, who’s used to taking orders from Jasmine, and so she translates that into being the gentlest to ride.

  I work my way back to Jasmine’s mane, which I always leave for last. As I move forward, though, her ears pin back against her head.

  Someone else is outside.

  “Hello,” I call out. There’s a wind that’s kicked up, and a gust brings a swirl of dead leaves whipping through the entranceway. The scratching of the leaves is surprisingly loud and it’s all I can hear for a few seconds, but Jasmine is still on alert. I glance over at Julie, and she’s equally tense, with her long face pulled down and her eyes shifting from Jasmine to the open stable door.

  “Hello,” I say again, trying to push my voice against the strengthening wind. A storm is probably coming.

  There’s a crunch of gravel outside, and a moment later Darren appears with a sharp rake in hand and sweat dripping off his forehead despite the cooler weather.

  “Morning,” he says, and tips his head towards me.

  Darren was out running errands in town when the lockdown order came. After the governor closed down the roads for all but essential services, Darren said he had a hell of a time getting back to Granfield. He said the roads were blockaded with police and that they wouldn’t let him pass at first, until he was able to prove that he worked at Granfield.

  He stumbles a bit when he takes a step into the stable, and his rake goes clattering down to the ground.

  “Sorry about that. I’ve been working out in the north-facing flower beds, trying to prep them for spring. I got a little carried away, I guess.” He shrugs and bends to sit down on an upturned bucket. “Those yew bushes can be tough to wrangle back.”

  I don’t say anything to him, because my mind is busy ticking off what the news has been telling us, in more and more rapid rotation, for the last month. Symptoms include: Dry cough. Shortness of breath. Fever.

  Darren stares at his hands. Even from where I’m standing I can see they’re shaking. He glances up and catches me looking, and then shoves his hands into his pockets.

  I haven’t been into town for at least a few weeks. We order feed for the horses online, and it gets delivered every month by a father-daughter team driving a white van. Mark had insisted we feed them only organic oats and hay, although sometimes I slip them a few cubes of Domino brand sugar, which I also put in my coffee in the mornings.

  Can horses get sick with it too?

  I try to push the thought away, but it needles at me.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask him. “Maybe you should go rest.”

  I try to make my voice more commanding than usual, but Darren doesn’t take the hint.

  “I have a lot more work to do. Spring is always a busy time for Granfield.”

  “I suppose that’s a silver-lining from this entire mess.” I call this over my shoulder as I start to lead Jasmine back to her stall, and farther away from Darren. “All we have now is time.”

  Darren gives a grunt that turns into a cough.

  Jasmine stops moving, and I have to put my hand flat against her side and guide her in through the stall door.

  I’m trying to think about what to do.

  The news said there’s a three percent death rate for this new virus. Which doesn’t seem too extreme, until you hear the other statistic.

  For people with other health conditions, like immune disorders or respiratory problems, then the mortality jumps to around thirty percent.

  And we don’t know whether the sickness can travel from species to species. We don’t know whether it kills horses like it kills people.

  “Your girl there seems to be feisty today.” Darren’s voice clips off at the end of the sentence, and another cough rattles through his chest.

  I look over my shoulder, and he’s still sitting on that bucket at the front of the stables. He’s conscious, but barely it seems. Darren’s eyes flit from spot to spot, like Julie’s were a few minutes ago, right before Darren showed up.

  Jasmine’s sleeping blanket flipped over her stall. I give myself a few seconds to consider it. It’s heavy, and thick enough to keep a big animal warm through winter nights. It could stop a man from breathing.

  I’d have to burn the blanket afterwards.

  “Darren,” I begin to say, reaching out for the blanket. Letting my mind go where it needs to go, and pushing the black hole that’s opened in my stomach down as far as it will go. I run through my head the list of places Darren has been, the things he’s touched.

  I’ll have to burn all of those too.

  The blanket is rough under my fingertips, and I have to tense my shoulder as I pull it down from its resting place on the boards surrounding Jasmine. She’s quiet in her stall. Julie looks on silently from behind me.

  Like I said, sometimes horses know me better than people do.

  I turn my head to the side and take a deep breath through the fabric of my shirt. I hear Darren breathe his own raspy breath. Another coughing fit is bound to start soon.

  They keep saying that’s how it spreads the fastest. Through droplets that we breathe in from someone else.

  It has to be now.

  I take the blanket in both hands and tense my chest, ready to wrap Darren’s head and upper body in it and roll him to the ground and out into the fields beyond. I know I’ll have to put extra pressure on the top of the blanket, to get him to stop breathing. To stop coughing, and spreading his sickness.

  “Hello,” a voice says from the open stabl
e doors. It’s a small voice. A young voice.

  I look up, blanket stretched between my hands, ready to smother the poor landscaper who had the unfortunate luck of going into town.

  Daphne’s ringlet curls frame her head. She’s wearing a bright pink dress today, with strawberries dancing across the fabric.

  “Can I pet the horses?” she asks. “I’m so bored.”

  I don’t hesitate. I run over to her, wrap the blanket around her as I pick her up in my arms, and take off towards the main house.

  I ignore her protests. She wriggles against my chest, but I keep repeating the same thing, over and over again.

  “It’s too late,” I tell her. “It’s too late.”

  8

  Felix

  Daphne and I are in the panic room. She’s reading a book with unicorns on the cover and I’m trying to do a crossword puzzle. The walls of the room are so thick that you can’t get a wireless signal, so both of us are having to entertain ourselves the old-fashioned way.

  We’ve been in here for almost five hours. My watch is analog still. Dad gave it to me.

  Mom’s come to check on us a few times already, and her face looms up on the screen, disembodied and ghost-like when we least expect it.

  “We’re almost done,” she tells us each time she jumps in to assure us that everything is perfectly fine. They just need us to stay in there a little longer. And then she says she loves us, but before Daphne or I can respond and tell her we love her too, the screen goes blank and she’s gone.

  One time at lunch I told the kids at my table that my family had a safe room. I may have called it a panic room, which probably made it even worse. But I was genuinely surprised that these other kids didn’t have a room like it in their houses.

  “It’s for when you need to go to a safe place,” I explained to them, like I was our math teacher walking them through an algebra problem.

  One boy who was pretty much nice to everyone and who had a port wine birthmark on the side of his right cheek was clearly going to try to make sense of what I was saying.

  “You mean, like where you go when there’s a tornado? In my house, we go down to the basement and stand in the corner by the washer and dryer.”

  I go to a fancy school. Parents have to pay a lot of money for their kids to go there, and you have to make an application video and write an essay—most people’s parents write them for their kids, I think, although Mom and Dad insisted I write my own. And everyone is really smart and sophisticated and posh. Which is partly why I couldn’t understand that this was the reaction I was getting. I’d never even seen the washer and dryer in our house. That was something Greta took care of.

  “No. Like a safe room you go to if people are in your house and trying to hurt your family.” All the faces seated around the long white cafeteria table stared back at me with confusion or concern, or—worst of all—fear on their faces.

  “It has padded walls and a special locking door, and nobody can get in or out without a code. There’s even a pad that scans your eye, like in the movies.”

  Total disbelief. A few of them started looking around the room for an excuse to get up. The nice boy with the red cheek gathered up the trash at the table and stood to throw it away in the communal trash bin.

  “That sounds weird,” a small boy with freckles and a cowlick said. “Your family is weird.”

  To their credit, none of the other boys laughed with him.

  After that, I started eating lunch in the library behind the 570.35-570.59 shelf. I also broke into Freckle’s locker and put a heavy dose of clear liquid laxative into the bread of his sandwich.

  I never got caught.

  I was upstairs in the old nanny’s rooms, staring through my telescope when I spotted Tobias hauling a huge blanket with tiny legs and arms wriggling out of it across the lawn at a full sprint. It took me a second to realize he had Daphne wrapped up in his arms. I blinked my lashes against the glass lens and tried to refocus my eyes. But what I saw was still the same. Tobias’ mouth was open like he was howling into the air. I’d never seen a grown-up look terrified before.

  I couldn’t see Daphne’s face.

  I rushed from the attic rooms and down the shallower wood stairs from third to second floor, and then on down the plushier stairs that take you from the second to the first floor. I was going to stay quiet and composed, like you see heroes do in action movies when faced with a crisis, but the sounds spilled out of my mouth, louder the closer I got to where I knew I’d cross with Tobias and my sister.

  “Help,” I screamed, until I was sucking in air and barely choking out the words. “Help them!”

  Margot got there first. “What’s happening?” She put her hands on my shoulders and stared into my eyes. I had to fight the urge to wriggle away from her touching me and keep running.

  I started to explain what I’d seen, but Tobias made it to the main house before I could finish. There was a loud banging on the back door, where the kitchen leads out onto the patio, and Margot let go of me long enough that I was able to slip from her grasp and open the door. Tobias didn’t look at either of us. He strode in, putting Daphne on the ground and releasing the blanket from around her.

  “Darren is sick,” he told the shining kitchen tiles. “He’s in the stables right now. I need to go back and take care of him.”

  Margot was helping Daphne untangle herself from the blanket. “I’ll go help you.”

  “No!” It was my mother’s voice. She stood at the entrance to the kitchen, backlit by the light streaming in through the windows in the main hall. Her hands were behind her back, like she was hiding something. I don’t know how long she’d been there.

  I hadn’t seen her the entire day. She was wearing jeans and a stretched-out sweatshirt, and her hair poked out from around her. She looked like a faded copy of her normal self.

  “Margot, take the children to the safe room.” Mom never called it the panic room in front of us, although I’d often heard her say that’s what it actually was, while she was hiring people to build it after everything that happened with Dad. She was still standing in the doorway. I thought it was weird that she wouldn’t go near us, because usually she was trying to hug us or kiss the tops of our heads whenever she was actually home. Mom turned to Tobias, who had the blanket gripped in his hands so tight his knuckles were white. “I’ll go with you.”

  Margot cast a sidelong look at my mother, but she didn’t say anything. Silently, she reached out and took Daphne’s hand and started to walk away from the rest of us. When I paused for a second, my mother’s voice cut through the air sharp like a knife. “Go,” she said, so I slunk off to join my sister while the grown-ups took care of Darren.

  Margot hadn’t stayed with us in the safe room. She said she’d be back to check on us, but that she needed to help our Mom and that, since she was a nurse, they needed her especially.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” Daphne’s voice breaks into my thoughts.

  “They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with Darren.”

  She turns a page in her book. My sister doesn’t look up from the colorful drawings of horses with pink tails and starbursts on their flanks. “They know what’s wrong with him.”

  I try to ignore her. Sometimes my sister can be difficult.

  I read the next clue in the crossword puzzle. Five across. Seven letters. A reptile from South America.

  “I said, they already know what’s wrong with him. That’s why we’re in here.”

  Daphne sets her book down, and stares over at me from beneath a curtain of her blond curls. “I saw him, you know. I was at the stables.”

  “What were you doing out there by yourself?” She’s not allowed by the horses without an adult chaperoning her. She knows that.

  “I just wanted to see them. But before I could get in and pet them, there was all this coughing and Tobias was saying something to Darren I think and then, boom, he’d grabbed me and carried me to the house in tha
t blanket that smelled like hay and old wood.”

  “Do you want to play a game?” I ask my sister, hoping to distract her from what I think she’s about to say, but it doesn’t work.

  “They’re going to kill him, you know,” Daphne says, before she tilts her head back to her book. She flips another page. “That’s why we’re locked in here. Because he has to die.”

  Day 3

  Brenna

  It’s not yet dawn. The tile of the floor beneath my bare feet is freezing from the night air. Mark had wanted to put in heated tiles, but I wouldn’t let him. I told him it was too pampered a life. What kind of children would we raise if they never had to experience any sort of discomfort, I’d asked him.

  He’d only raised his eyebrow and deferred to me with a deep kiss and a squeeze of my shoulder. We were years away from having children, but even then we knew.

  Or, at least we thought we did.

  I flick on the recessed lights above the sink in the kitchen and start to make a list.

  Outside the kitchen window there’s a thick fog that’s come to lay around the small hills and valleys of the surrounding fields. I wonder if the horses are warm inside their stable. If Jasmine is missing her blanket.

  I fight the violent, rapid urge to vomit. I don’t have time for this.

  I grip my pen and write down what I know.

  We definitely don’t have enough cereal. Or milk. I wish I’d had Greta stock up on things like peanut butter, with lots of protein and fat. Something growing bodies could really depend on. Daphne loved having peanut butter on toast in the morning for her breakfast.

  But Margot’s allergic to peanuts.

  We don’t have enough of a lot of things.

  I scan the cupboards of the sleek Swedish-inspired shelving Mark had installed when we first moved in. They are bursting in certain areas, with bags of lentils and quinoa almost overflowing from the clear edges designed to hold everything in without seeming obtrusive. All the chalkboard labels are written in somebody else’s handwriting—probably Greta’s. Or one of the other people we paid to help make this huge house run.