The Shuddering

there was too much to bear. If he’d just been less rough with her, she wouldn’t have stormed off on her own. If he’d just insisted that she come back inside, Ryan and Lauren wouldn’t have gone to get her. Lauren would still be alive as well.
    He nearly jumped when Ryan’s hand fell onto his shoulder.
    “Stop thinking about it,” Ryan told him.
    “Easy,” Sawyer said softly.
    Ryan shook his head, assuring Sawyer that he knew his request was next to impossible, but he was right: They had to focus on facts, not assumptions, and the only thing they knew for sure was that the three of them needed to get out of there; they needed to get to safety. The sooner they could come up with a plan that wouldn’t get them killed, the sooner they could find April and bring her home.
    Sawyer turned away from the door, and for the first time he realized just how many windows were in the cabin. Those things could come crashing through the glass and end them all. “It isn’t safe in here,” he said. “We can’t stay in here like this.”
    Ryan nodded, looking around as if coming to the same realization. “It doesn’t help that this place is massive either,” he muttered. “Pops didn’t consider what a pain in the ass it would be to secure this place in case of an apocalypse.”
    “What if we choose a room?”
    “What, like the pantry? It took us less than an hour to start going nuts in there.”
    “We should at least board them up,” Sawyer insisted. The idea of just sitting there waiting for something to happen was insane.
    “With what?” Ryan asked. “Furniture?” He glanced down the hall to see if Jane was there, then took a step closer to Sawyer, lowering his voice. “Those fucking things tore one of her legs off like it was nothing. You think they aren’t going to be able to get in if they want to?”
    “So what are we supposed to do, just wait for them to come get us?”
    “We’ll gather up a bunch of supplies, stick to one area, and if they come, then we’ll have to fight.”
    “Fight.” Sawyer gave Ryan an even look. They were both thinking the same thing: how in the world were the going to fight those things? Sawyer hadn’t seen the exchange, but if they had been able to rip one of Lauren’s limbs from her body it meant that they were impossibly strong.
    “Look, everything has to have a weakness. Those pieces of shit have an Achilles heel; we just have to find it.”
    Jane stared at herself in the guest bathroom mirror. She looked tired, haggard, as though she’d been up for days. Dropping her gaze to the sink, she turned on the cold water. Her hands were shaking badly.
    She had imagined herself in bad scenarios before—a lone gunman trudges through the halls of Powell Elementary, his sights set on Ms. Adler’s second grade class. She had envisioned herself blocking the door with her desk, then grouping everyone in a single corner, all of them low to the ground, soft whimpers of fear slithering across the linoleum floor. Despite it being no match for a gun, the pepper spray in her purse had made hermore confident. If anything did happen, at least she had some way of defending herself.
    The pepper spray had been a gift, still in her purse upstairs. After she had an incident in a parking garage with an inebriated bum, Ryan had picked it up for her at a sporting goods store. He had offered to buy her a gun, insisting that it was no big deal, that he’d drive her out to the gun range a couple of weekends in a row, that they’d get her a license to carry a concealed weapon, but guns scared her. She had watched one of her uncles aim through a scope and shoot an elk dead during a hunting trip when she was a kid. Ryan had been there, running toward the carcass as fast as he could after their uncle said it was safe. Growing up in Colorado, hunting was a part of life. Every other restaurant had a stuffed head mounted on the wall, proclaiming the majesty of the Rockies by displaying the dead. The Adlers eventually stopped going to their father’s favorite barbecue joint because of all the taxidermy on the walls. Jane had burst into tears over a plate of pulled pork, insisting that the deer that hung over the fireplace in the center of the dining room looked sad, like it had been crying for its mother when it had been killed.
    She splashed water onto her face, remembering her father’s toughness. He would have told her to put her war face on—this was no time for tears, but time for