Lights Out (Book 3): Front Lines

by Cal, Sarah

  An objection wasn’t what came, though. Chase sat with her, using a hand under her chin to get her to look up and meet his eyes. They were hardened, his whole expression tense, so different from the last time she'd seen him, and she remembered why she'd made this man her strength while leaning on his own.

  "I swear that I will support you with whatever you do, Emma," he said with urgency. "But please wait before acting. Whatever you're going to do, it doesn’t have to be right now. You have to think of yourself and your sister right now. Otherwise, your emotions will cloud your judgment."

  She tightened her jaw. She couldn’t argue with that. She was feeling a little uncontrollable already, feeling empty one moment then consumed with rage in another. But she didn’t know how long it would take her to calm down from something like this. But she would channel her self-blame into hate and aim it in a safe enough direction.

  "How could I forgive the people who murdered my grandmother in cold blood?" she asked. "Don’t fucking joke like that unless you want to make me angry. Of course I'm going to do this Chase, and I can't wait like you're asking me to. I don’t think I can. No matter what, I'll want to get my revenge. And as soon as possible to I can take down as many of these bastards as possible for everything they have done."

  He had to have known that about her by now, after everything they'd been through. It might not have been like the recent her, but Emma had grown a little ruthless once the large calculated attacks started happening. And she could see the resignation fill his expression, though his eyes didn’t get any softer, so she knew he was still on her side, at least. Well, no matter. She planned to finish this, when she could, and it would hopefully be soon.

  She got out of bed and started to get dressed, not caring that he was there watching.

  "I need to go out and find clues."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  "Let me go with you."

  She stopped at Chase's call. "What?"

  "Please, Emma? You're going to look for clues, so let me go out with you."

  Well, she couldn’t exactly say it was unexpected, but she really did feel like going at this alone this time. Chase was a crutch for her, and she had to stop using him as one at some point. She'd managed to find her own footing at some point, but everything she'd worked on would be worth nothing if she just kept dragging him around with her.

  "Could you just stay here for now?" she asked without turning around.

  "What?" he said, like a mimic of what she had earlier, and she almost smiled.

  "Merry is still going to need some help. I don’t know what will happen if we're both not here. There won't be anyone to protect her."

  Chase had to stay and look after Merry for her, at least. After all, he'd failed to stop Janice from leaving the house.

  Stop it! she snapped at herself in her mind.

  She was not going to turn any of the blame on Chase. He was her friend. She offered him a place at her house, not as a tool to be used, but because she wanted him nearby and it would be beneficial to all of them. It wasn’t his job to be their baby sitter, and he wouldn’t have known anything would happen any more than she did. If there had been a way, she knew Chase would have helped, might have even jumped in front of the bullet himself.

  Instead of calming down, though, she only grew angrier at the people responsible for it all. She couldn’t blame Chase for it, but she did need to go and find out more about the people that were. She would not rest until she had done something about this.

  For the moment, it was the only thing keeping her from breaking down. Just because tragedy came, didn’t mean the whole thing was over. People could come back any time, and Emma was done just waiting for them to show up. She couldn’t afford to lie down and grieve for her grandmother, because she had to look out for her remaining family. The danger wasn’t gone, but after this, she intended to chase it.

  "Emma, I'm sure she'll be fine for a little while. Where do you even plan to go?"

  She hesitated. Where to start searching for clues? It wasn’t like they had much to go on, anyway. Well, there was the car still parked outside, though the bodies of their assailants had probably been moved already. It was all she had, and she could only hope that she could get something out of it.

  If not, she wasn’t sure how far she would have to go. She might get tempted to search the dead bodies for something, though the thought of it made her nose wrinkle in disgust.

  No. She had to find something in the truck if she was going to move forward at all.

  "Just outside, to start with," she muttered, faltering.

  "See? It's not even that far. And besides, she was sleeping the last time I checked up on her. She took her medicine, so she should sleep well for now, shouldn't she?"

  Emma couldn’t be sure, and that was why she was so hesitant to leave Merry alone. Yes, she was taking her medicine, and that was a good thing. But just how useful would the stuff even be? There was no way to tell. She had finally exhausted herself crying, but it was too soon since the incident happened and even medicated, she might still get woken up by a nightmare. She'd come awake plenty of times without Emma realizing, and she'd only known when she went into her room. Merry had probably gotten only a little more than the amount of sleep she had last night.

  "Just let me, Emma, please. It would be more dangerous outside than in here."

  But Chase didn’t have a weapon. There probably wouldn’t be another attack so soon after the last one, but if the invaders didn’t return to where they came from, wouldn’t someone take some form of action? It would be nice if they played some caution, but from here on out she was going to be completely on her guard.

  "I need to look after you too, Emma. I was completely useless yesterday, so at least let me do this much for you."

  That was what broke her down. No, he hadn't been useless, he had helped them with Janice's body and taken care of them. She felt that way at all, but she had never thought that of Chase, ever. Just having his presence nearby was helping, and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she was just taking him out to the street. She didn’t refuse him anymore, letting him follow as she left her room, then the house.

  Chase and Emma headed to the abandoned car that their enemies drove in town. Some of Emma’s neighbors looked at her in shock.

  She could imagine they hadn't thought she would come out of her home for a while. Most people would not be as calm the way she must have seemed to them so soon. It hadn't even been that long, the whole thing was less than twenty four hours ago, it must have surprised them that she was well enough to be doing this, and others even asked if she’s okay.

  No.

  Of course she wasn’t okay. If she didn’t have more important things to do, she would have gotten on their case for saying something so stupid. She'd just lost her grandmother, what could possibly be okay about that? It was a stupid question to ask, and she was fighting anger for a moment.

  They must have actually wanted an answer from her, because she could see them grow anxious when she didn’t immediately say something.

  "Um... miss?"

  If they really felt sorry for her, they should have left her alone. She wasn’t the kind of person that would go off and tell someone when she was feeling heartbroken. And she could not offer some lame excuse about being 'fine' to these people. Even Chase and Merry didn’t ask that of her. Why on earth would they ask if she was okay, when it should be obvious that there was no way she possibly could be?

  Emma could have blown up at them, but instead let the urge die down. There were more important things to do and she devoted herself to that.

  She shrugged them off, shifting her focus. "I want to look in the vehicle for clues."

  They stepped aside to allow her in and continued clearing the streets of debris and bodies. She would have thought they would be done with that already, considering hours had passed, but they must have taken a break themselves. She looked around and counted the bodies that she could see. The number wasn�
��t that big, though she didn’t know how many they'd already moved. At some point, she should probably also find out whether someone on their side had died, but she could worry about that later.

  Emma looked inside the car for something that would determine where the people have come from. It was a long shot. They might not have had anything, and it wasn’t like they had forensics available to check every little thing. So if it wasn’t something obvious, they were screwed.

  There has to be something!

  She forced herself to search meticulously, instead moving frantically with the desperation growing in her mind. Anything that could give her some clue to track these people back to where they'd come from, so she could get what she wanted. Because right then, revenge was the only thing she could think about, and she intended to get it no matter what.

  Finally, she found something in the car, and felt the triumph warm her chest. It was a wrapper from a farm-store. She recognized the logo on it, and realizes it was from Brassville, the town that attacked them when they visited.

  She'd actually forgotten all about that trip. it was the one where she went to with Chase and Brian, when they had to walk back for a whole day, and she'd gotten back, injured, only to get locked up because the person she'd accidentally shot at happened to be at the police station when she went there to get help for Brian. Kellen had kicked him out of his house, and Emma hadn't known, and he'd been starving to the point of collapsing on their way back. Emma and Chase had been bad off, but not nearly as far once they had their supplies taken from them.

  If she hadn't been at the police station at that exact time, she could have saved herself some grief. Maybe she and the woman she shot at would have met anyway, but it would have been in another point and time, and it would have saved her a lot of grief if she wasn’t locked up, injured, tired and hungry.

  Emma cursed them as she pulled out of the vehicle to find Chase standing right there. She held it up for him, and he was quick to realize as well.

  "I plan to go back there and shoot them all down."

  He looked a little alarmed at her sudden declaration. Well, she wasn’t kidding.

  Emma didn’t know why he was so alarmed. It wasn’t like she had hidden the reason for searching out clues. She wanted some info on the people she needed to seek revenge from, it wasn’t so she could sit down and wait for more of them to come, ask them about their origins, then shoot them down if they were from the same town. That process would take too long.

  After the welcome they received, and even sending people into their town? People that had attacked their town, stolen things from the hospital and attacked her neighborhood, killing her grandmother. Like hell Emma was going to let it slide. Besides, those idiots injured her that time, so she owned them plenty already. They should have stuck to their crazy antics instead of bothering other people.

  "There must be another way to punish them," Chase said quickly, reaching out an arm to her. "Just going out and shooting them is murder. You can't tell me you don’t know that."

  She took a step back, looking at him like he'd betrayed her. "What would you call what they did to my grandmother, Chase?"

  He tightened his jaw and didn’t say anything.

  "Yeah, so you can see part of my reasoning. These were people with guns that didn’t have a problem with killing people at all. She wasn’t supposed to be outside at all, Chase. Neither was Merry. But do you know who the person running at us was aiming at?"

  She waited, not saying anything until he slowly shook his head.

  "It was a woman, and she was aiming straight for Merry. Even though I wasn’t that far from her, and I was the one with a gun hanging on my shoulder. But Merry, unarmed and defenseless, was her chosen target." He looked confused, and Emma gave him a dark green.

  "The bullet didn’t somehow bend and his Janice, she jumped in front of Merry and took the bullet instead."

  His eyes widened as his jaw dropped in shock. Emma wondered how many people that had been there, besides her and Merry, had even seen what happened? They had probably all been focusing on their own thing and didn’t get to see Janice's heroic act in the end. It only just occurred to her that she hadn't told Chase any details. He'd just come out to find them crying on the street over the dead, bloody body of their grandmother.

  "I can’t think of a punishment bad enough for what they did. They’ve done wrong by us at least twice, and we have every right to get revenge."

  He didn’t look like he agreed with her, though, and that only made her more upset. Even after knowing the details of what happened, how could he not feel just like her? If the damn woman had been aiming at Emma, things would have gone differently. May might still have ended up shot, but Janice and Merry would have been saved.

  Part of her argued that Janice might have tried to jump in front of her, too, and Emma had been the one closer to her to begin with. She couldn’t even say how her grandmother had moved to fast and actually made it there in time. But the rifle Emma had wouldn’t have left space for anything like that, and she would have instinctively moved to be in front of her grandmother. She may or may not have taken the shot and gotten it before the other woman did, but her grandmother would have lived.

  And these were the people Chase, her best friend, was suggesting she forgive? Their comrades would probably just be as bad as they were, and Emma wouldn’t show them any mercy, like they hadn't shown her town and her family any.

  "Please Emma, you have to think this through. They might not all have been in on it—"

  "But plenty of them would," she snapped back. "You remember what that place was like. Do you think the people that have been coming here and taking from us are the kind of people to share so freely?"

  She was guessing all of this, but she didn't think she was wrong. There was no way a whole town would have gone crazy like that, and she had wondered before, briefly, what could have happened to the people that tried to keep their sanity.

  Emma remembered the day after the crash, when she had gone to Chase's place to get his stuff so he could move in with her family. They had gone with her and Merry's bikes, only to get them stolen. So they had ended up walking the way back, and they came across a bunch of kids trying to break into a store, that Emma had brought food from earlier that day. When Emma tried to stop them, they had set their eyes on she and Chase instead. If she hadn't had the gun, and the group hadn't been made up of delinquent teenagers, they might have gotten hurt. It could have easily happened in other towns, the same circumstances in different situations.

  "Do you think they would have left people alive in their own town that they didn’t care about if they didn’t go along with their plans? You know how this sort of thing goes, you told me yourself. They would have attacked their own people, then banded together to attack others to benefit themselves."

  She could definitely picture them doing that. Because surely, not everyone would have gone that crazy. If the sane people had tried to stop them, Emma couldn’t imagine they'd been left alive. The question was, how many would have thought to speak up at all? She couldn’t imagine it was many. The whole situation just made her more and more angry, and Chase wasn’t going to put her off from this.

  Besides, hadn't he said he would support her in whatever she chose to do? So why was he so against this? If they did nothing, this would all just continue, wouldn’t it? Letting people just come into their town and attack them... if they could be stopped before they made it that far, wouldn’t that be a lot better for them?

  "They deserve everything they get and we need to attack them before they send more people, Chase."

  There was some hesitation, but then Chase sighed. "If that’s what you want, then we need to get a team of our strongest together. We have the truck, so that's one advantage, but we don’t know their numbers. We'll need lots of weapons

  "I want to take Merry with me—she deserves revenge too."

  Chase looked at her like she was crazy. "Emma, you can't. You happen
to be okay, but I have a feeling your sister will be a little unstable when she wakes up. Merry is a liability, you can't take her on a trip like that. It would be too dangerous for all involved and three times as bad for her."

  But Emma had her mind made up. Maybe, this would be good for Merry, too. If Emma was feeling this way, she couldn’t be the only one. She remembered Merry's anger and grief after their parents died, and imagined she would probably feel that way, too. Of course, she wouldn’t force her sister to go if she really didn’t want to, but Emma had a feeling Merry wouldn’t turn her down if she asked.

  "I'm taking her whether you likes it or not, Chase. She needs closure as much as I do. I know I won't rest until I see them all taken down, why shouldn’t she think the same after what they did? Yeah, I shot at the person that made the kill shot, but they weren’t working alone, I'm sure of it. All of them need to pay for what they did.

  Chase actually took a step back from her, and it made Emma stop and blink. She hadn't moved, yet the look on his face was suddenly full of surprise and caution. She reined herself in, wondering if she was letting her anger get the better of her.

  "Your attitude is scaring me. You need to calm down, Emma. This is why I told you to wait. Can you even hear yourself? This isn’t exactly a rational plan, you know?"

  Of course she knew what she was saying. And it might not be rational, but to her thinking, it was only fair. Who knew how many people from that town had done something like this to so many other towns? There were areas closer to them than Emma's town, and she wondered if they had gone through them before making their way to her town. Probably. Really, she was doing a big favor for a lot of people.

  "I have no reason to be calm, so I won’t be."

  She stormed back to the house. She had to look in on her sister, get something to eat for herself, and they had to decide what to do with their grandmother's body. She'd think up a plan and put it into motion soon.