Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  “You’re right, girl,” I tell her. “But we’ve got everything figured out. Everyone’s going to be fine.”

  I move along to Julie, and then to the other horses. A few minutes later, the stable is full of the sounds of large flat teeth grinding down the mixture of hay and oats I like to feed them in the morning. I freshen their water next, make sure to keep my eyes away from the spot where Darren sat yesterday, or the empty spot on the floor where Brenna and I snatched everything he’d touched in order to throw them into the fire.

  There’s no blood to clean up.

  The news says that the disease doesn’t travel by blood anyway.

  It moves through the air, like a song.

  I take Jasmine out to brush down, and feed her a cube of sugar from the palm of my hand. There are only maybe twenty or so left in the box.

  As I comb Jasmine’s mane into a high shine, I stare out into the field where the creature moved through the tall grass two days ago.

  We were going to find out the next week if it was a boy or a girl.

  I didn’t know until I was in court, and the prosecutor was giving her opening statements. That’s when I learned we were having a girl. The coroner was able to tell after doing the autopsy.

  The baby would be six now, if she had lived.

  Colleen would be thirty-two.

  12

  Felix

  “Why are they making us stay in here so long?” Daphne’s voice has that whiny quality that tells me she’s about two seconds away from an all-out tantrum.

  They used to be worse when she was younger. She’d kick and scream and bite whoever was nearest to her when she didn’t get her way. But then Mom and Dad had somebody with a clipboard and a tight bun come to the house for a few weeks and things got better. I wasn’t allowed to be there for whatever they were doing with Daphne though. Mom said it would make her embarrassed.

  Mom told me they’d do the same thing for me when she scheduled sessions to help with what has been happening at school. Daphne wouldn’t be allowed to watch, or even meet the person who came to help. But then we had to stay home, and school was canceled. We all have bigger problems now, I guess.

  We spent the night in the panic room, Daphne and I, and even though there are huge air ducts in the ceiling that supposedly pump fresh air in on a regular basis from some special source, the air smells stale. Like potato chips and jelly sandwiches, which is what we had for dinner last night from the rations stashed away in a pantry drawer in the corner, and morning breath and a slight whiff of chemical toilet from the bathroom.

  I’m pretty sure both Daphne and I are a bit dehydrated. It’s easy enough to forget to drink water when your normal schedule is disrupted. I read once in a physiology and anatomy book what happens to the human body when it’s deprived of enough water.

  I don’t answer Daphne and instead get up and move to the bathroom to pour a big glass of water. I take a long deep sip and then refill it and bring it over to my sister.

  She pushes the cup away from me and turns her shoulders so she’s staring into the corner, which is all white padding and clean metal lines.

  “You’ll feel better if you take a sip.”

  “How do you think they killed him?” she asks me. I ignore her again, and sit down next to her along the bench. I dare for a second to put my arm around her, like I’ve seen big brothers do in movies, but when she squirms away I let my arm drop back to my side.

  “They didn’t kill him.” I put the cup down on the bench between us, like a dividing cubicle. I’m still hoping she’ll drink it.

  By this point, from the white bread and the potato chips, her cells are probably contracting, searching out water from wherever they can find it. She’ll be getting a headache soon, if she doesn’t have one already.

  “Are we going to get sick?”

  “That’s why Mom has us waiting in here. So we don’t get sick.”

  “Yeah, but I saw him. I was there in the stables with Tobias. He might have coughed on me. He might have inflicted me.”

  “Infected.” Realizing my mistake, I add, “He didn’t infect you. You’re fine. You said you didn’t get close to him, and Tobias wrapped you up in that blanket and carried you to the house to be extra safe. And then Mom made us wait up in here. So you’re fine, and I’m fine.”

  I nod reassuringly, but Daphne can’t see because her head is still turned away.

  I nudge the glass of water closer to her leg.

  “I want Mom,” she says.

  “Me too.”

  We haven’t seen our mother since yesterday evening, although she might have popped in on the video screen to check on us while we were sleeping. It was surprising how easy it was to fall asleep, even though the cots in the panic room are tinier than my normal bed and the pillows are scratchier. Daphne was asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.

  The only issue is that you can’t turn the lights off in the room. They stay on, in case of emergency. So that was a little weird, but there were eye masks under each of the pillows that Daphne and I could use. Mom reminded us about them when she came to say goodnight.

  She looked stretched out in the video monitor when we last saw her. It was like her neck and shoulders were pulling away from each other. I’d read about cheekbones and bone structure in that same anatomy book where they talked about the effects of dehydration, but I’d never really noticed anybody’s cheekbones until I saw my mother on that screen last night. They were like two knives, slicing across her face and making the shadows in her cheeks darker.

  I hope Mom got some sleep last night too. I know she’s doing all of this for us.

  And for Dad.

  “Do you want to play a game?”

  Daphne shrugs, but I see her right arm slip out from underneath where she’s tucked it against her chest and grasp out for the glass of water.

  She takes a sip. And then another.

  “What should we play?” she asks meekly, and internally I take a deep sigh because I think we’ve passed the danger zone, and because she’s doing what I asked her to do.

  “What do you want to play?”

  “Hide and seek,” she answers immediately.

  I look around our surroundings. Four walls with four cots built into the one side. A pantry shelf full of food, and the door that leads into the bathroom.

  “There’s not really anywhere to hide,” I say cautiously.

  “But that’s what I want to play!” That edge to her voice is back.

  Daphne stands up and balls her hands into two little fists. “Please, Felix. Please, please pretty please!”

  “But where would we hide?” I try to reason with her.

  A crimson flush spreads over her neck and cheeks. “I want to hide from everyone!” she shouts. “I don’t want to be here anymore! I’m sick of being stuck inside here with you!”

  I hold out my hands, palms flat, in a sign of calm or surrender—I figure either will work at the moment.

  “Okay, okay, we can play hide and seek. Which do you want to do first?”

  But it’s too late. I’ve seen this happen too many times. She has to ride this out, and then she’ll collapse in an exhausted heap, all of her energy spent.

  “I said, I don’t want to be here with you anymore!” Daphne’s eyes bug out of her face as she shouts at me. “I hate you. You are the worst, ugliest, stupidest, most disgusting brother in the world.”

  I grit my teeth. I know she doesn’t mean any of this.

  It’s just hard to remember sometimes, when your sister’s spit is flying in your face and your father is dying and your mother has forced you into the panic room in your haunted mansion because somebody has brought a deadly infectious disease into your quarantined house.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I say in as soothing a voice as I can manage. My arms are still held out, and they’re serving as a shield to Daphne’s flailing arms and legs while her tantrum hits its crescendo—we’d just started to pick out i
nstruments in school before all of this happened. I was going to play the saxophone.

  “No, nothing is ever going to be all right, ever again. Not until I don’t have such an awful, stupid, ugly brother.” She pauses for a second, and every rational part of my brain knows she’s going to try to hurt me as much as possible, and even still I can’t control my reaction to what she says next.

  “No wonder everyone at school hates you. No wonder you don’t have any friends. Even Mom and Dad have to pretend to like you. Why don’t you just die already, because no one would care if you were here or not.”

  I reach out and slap her hard across the face. So hard that one of her baby teeth—which was loose already, but still—flies out from her mouth, along with an arc of blood and spit. It leaves a streak of red along one of the white padded walls.

  “Shut your mouth, you stupid bitch,” I tell her, and instantly regret it. I instantly regret everything that happened in the last two seconds.

  “Felix,” a voice echoes from the locked doorway of the room, panic and rage stretching the words out. “What are you doing?”

  I don’t have to turn my head from my sister’s bleeding mouth. I already know.

  It’s Mom, come to save us both.

  13

  Day 4

  Brenna

  I wake first. Before I can stop myself, I brush a tendril of hair back from her forehead.

  Margot’s eyes flutter open, and she gives me a sleepy smile.

  I force my mouth into something that resembles a smile, because she deserves it. She’s not the reason for the sharp pains threatening to rip open my body, straight down the middle until I don’t have to feel anything anymore.

  “I missed you.”

  Margot looks away as she says this to me, shyness getting the better of her. She’s sprawled across the bed, naked from the waist up. Her dark hair falls along her shoulders in loose curls and there’s a red flush spread under her right collarbone that I touch with my fingertips, like a baker testing to see if their tender cake is done. My fingers leave a small white circle before the flush spreads back across Margot’s skin. I bend down to kiss her, and as I do Margot reaches her hands from inside the bedsheets and runs her fingers through my hair, which I can feel is damp from sweating in my sleep.

  It’s not a crime to be lonely, I remind myself.

  She’s a kind person. Margot.

  Kindness can be its own aphrodisiac. Sometimes it’s better than beauty—although Margot is objectively gorgeous, with her dark brown eyes and rich chestnut hair framing a face straight out of some Renaissance portrait. And better than strength—although I’ve seen Margot clean the gaping wounds my husband gives himself, and change his soiled sheets, and yesterday I saw her take a deep breath and move forward with the danger at hand like a soldier going into battle; there’s nothing about her that doesn’t seem to be reinforced with steel underneath.

  When someone is kind to you, you know that you matter in this world, if only for the sake of being able to make that person feel better about themselves because they’re caring for you in that moment.

  After finding my children ready to kill each other in the one place I thought they’d stay safe, I felt so useless.

  So I went to find Margot last night, after the children were back in their own beds.

  We didn’t say a word to each other. I kissed her, and she pulled the door closed behind me and now here we are, with the morning light arcing through her bedroom windows onto her porcelain skin.

  I pull my sweater from yesterday back over my head, and the cashmere slips over the welts on my shoulders like a gentle caress. Bruises are popping up on my body in unexpected places, and I’m certain I don’t want Margot to see them any more than she already has.

  “Where are you going?” she asks me as I stand.

  “The children will be waking soon.” I scan the room for anything else I might have scattered onto the floor last night. I see the clip for my hair underneath the armchair in the corner, and bend down to snatch it up. “I don’t want them to wake to an empty house.”

  Margot nods and gets up from the bed. “Okay. I’ll start on breakfast.”

  But I suddenly don’t want her there, reeking of sex and our night together as she cooks eggs for my children.

  “That’s okay.” I force a smile again. She doesn’t deserve this, but I’m doing it all the same. “I can handle that. Why don’t you go and check on Mark, and then we can trade?”

  “I’m sorry about Darren.”

  I’d turned towards the door, my hand poised on the handle and ready to make my quick escape, but she knows she’s got me again.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for. It had to happen. We couldn’t risk anyone else getting infected.”

  I lock my eyes on hers, seeing if she might challenge the rationale I’ve been playing across the back of my own mind since Tobias shut the door to Darren’s apartment and told me that it was finished.

  “I know. I’m still sorry.”

  Margot stands and slips her arms around me. She’s only wearing pajama shorts, and I let myself reach out and put my palms flat against the two pale crescents of her shoulder blades. Everything about her is so different from Mark.

  I let go, her skin underneath my hands suddenly too hot to touch.

  There’s a soft groan that echoes from somewhere further inside the house.

  My eyes meet Margot’s again, and she flashes her eyebrows at me, as if to say, “Don’t you know?”

  “What was that?” I ask.

  She’s still so close to me that I can smell the bit of toothpaste on her breath. She must have gotten up in the night to brush her teeth, after I’d fallen asleep despite trying to stay awake, and made it back to the couch in Mark’s rooms.

  Nervous energy tugs at my legs. I need to go. There’s so much to do.

  The moan comes again, this time stretching longer across the still air of the house.

  “I don’t understand,” I tell Margot. Nothing about what’s happening makes any sense. Nothing about this house is right.

  Margot’s face softens and she puts her hand up on my shoulder in such a way that I have to fight the urge to swat it off.

  “It’s Felix. It’s your son.”

  14

  Felix

  I woke crying again. I don’t know why it happens some mornings and not others.

  It’s not even really a cry. It’s more like a howl—like you’d hear from some mutant in a movie—that comes from deep inside my chest. It knows it doesn’t belong inside me, and so it fights to get out.

  I haven’t told anyone about it, because even though it’s scary when it’s happening, I feel a lot better afterwards. You know how when you’re sick to your stomach, and then you finally throw up whatever bad food you ate, and then suddenly your body gives this sigh of relief and you feel a hundred percent better. That’s what it feels like, and if I tell someone about it, then they might do something that makes it stop. And then I’d feel sick forever.

  My bedroom is bright with sunshine. I do a quick assessment to try to see if I need to let any more out, but inside my chest is quiet.

  There’s a peacefulness in my head that comes too, after it’s done.

  I hear a soft creak outside my door, but when I pause for a moment to see if somebody might be coming in, there’s no knock that follows and the hallway goes quiet. It’s windy outside, so air is probably seeping into the house through cracks and making it sound like people are going up and down the halls and in and out of rooms.

  My telescope is waiting for me in the corner after I climb out of bed and use the bathroom. Sometimes the best sightings I have are in the early morning, when the rest of the world thinks everyone else is still getting up. I point over at the stables, but there’s a mist that’s fallen onto the valley and I can only make out the roof of the building clearly. I swing the viewer over to the further corner of our property, where the greenhouse sits next to Darren’s apartment
and the old machinery barn. There’s a few swirls of smoke still snaking up from somewhere near the glass walls of the greenhouse, but it’s gotten too light to see if there’s a fire burning that far away.

  Mom said yesterday that Darren had to leave, because he was really sick, and that Daphne and I weren’t allowed to go near his apartment. If we did, she said we’d lose our screen time for an entire week, which Daphne and I both know is a bluff on Mom’s part. She wouldn’t be able to survive with us all gathered inside this house without our screens for distraction. Still, I don’t want to worry her, and she seemed really scared by the idea of us going anywhere near his apartment.

  I make a note to check on the vectors of viruses in the book I left on my desk. I like looking up information in books rather than on the internet. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed online, or to get into stuff that’s nasty or nude or both, whereas books have beginnings and ends and only include information that’s related to the actual reason the book exists in the first place.

  I should know something about viruses and how they spread already, but I don’t. Knowledge is power and all that, but I didn’t want to look this stuff up, not when it was clear that it was about to happen to us.

  There’s no fog around Darren’s apartment, and I refocus the lens of my telescope, hoping to get a closer view of what’s inside. I never had much interest in him before this, but now Mom doesn’t want me over there I really want to look.

  What I see is totally uninteresting. There are the familiar outlines of a sofa and bookcase through one window, and I can see the digital display of what looks like a microwave on a stand through the other window on the side of the building facing towards my room.

  I sit back and blink my eye. Sometimes this helps me see better.