“S...sorry. It was instinctive,” said Alicia. “But this isn't the time to be kidding around anyway.”

Alicia briefly explained what was going on. Maxine lit another cigarette while she listened, looking skeptical as she did.

“...and the call was coming from inside the house,” Alicia finished, trembling with fright.

Maxine scoffed. “You're kidding, right? You're trying to spook me with a prehistoric scary story like that? Me?”

“I'm serious,” begged Alicia. “Please believe me. I don't know if he's still in there or not, but a couple minutes ago there was definitely somebody either in the dad's office or in the kitchen. I wouldn't make this up.”

As she blew off a plume of smoke, Maxine shrewdly inspected the cheerleader. It really didn't look like Alicia was joking. She had definitely heard something, anyway.

“Hey, look at me!” shouted Charity. She was over on the other side of the porch, where the cigarette had landed. She had it in her mouth and was crouching like an anime delinquent, arms stretched out in front of her on her knees. “Oi oi, what are you looking at, punk?” Neither Maxine nor Alicia knew what she was supposed to be.

“Ch-Charity!” cried Alicia. “You have to stay close, remember? And get that thing out of your-”

Maxine suddenly gripped her upper arm, silencing her. “Shh!” A hiss escaped her black-painted lips. “You hear that?”

Alicia listened.

The spill of yellow indoor light projected from the glass door and onto the porch suddenly seemed very insubstantial. As an attempt to impress its influence on the night, to combat the darkness and the evils that may wait within it, it was pitiful. Almost laughable.

Somewhere in the black backyard, outside the light, Alicia heard... “Hehhh...hehhh...”

“Inside!” shouted Alicia urgently. “Everybody get insi-”

Arms from the darkness, closing around Charity's shoulders like the mouth of a hungry beast. The little girl screamed.

“Oh shit!” exclaimed Maxine.

“Charity!” cried Alicia. And then she was running to her. She didn't have a plan, she didn't have a weapon. A part of her briefly acknowledged what a stupid thing this was to do. But she was doing it anyway, there was no choice to be made.

“Help! Help!” Charity screamed. Alicia grabbed her and dug her heels in, determined not to let the stranger take her. She grabbed at his arms, tried to loosen them.

“L-let go of her!” Alicia shouted. Up close, Alicia could see the outline of his hood, and his tall, hulking body. As she wrestled with him, she could feel his strength, and it made her feel very small. She may have been athletic, but she was still a teenage girl and this was an adult man in good physical shape. This was a potentially fatal mismatch.

Then, a flash of metal at her side. The spikes on Maxine's wristband, and the switchblade she held in her hand.

Chulk! She stabbed the blade into the stranger's shoulder. A spurt of blood ejaculated from the wound, splattering small round droplets of red up Maxine's arm.

“Rrrr!” the stranger howled in pain. He let go of Charity and his fingers wrapped in agony around the handle of the knife.

“Come on! Inside!” shouted Maxine. Alicia was slow to react, so Maxine put a guiding hand on her upper back. She found the cheerleader trembling violently.

The trio ran inside. Alicia closed the sliding door and locked it.

“Fuck, you weren't joking. Fuck,” said Maxine.

“What do we do?” shivered Alicia, eyes wide. “What do we do?”

“We need weapons!”

“W-weapons? Weapons?” echoed Alicia. Her mind felt scrambled by fear and shock. Somehow she didn't understand what Maxine was saying. She felt small and scared. She wished she was in Charity's shoes, that she had someone stronger and more reliable that she could defer to and depend on. That was what Chase had been to her in the past, in other dangerous situations like this. But Chase wasn't here now, and that petrified her.

Then, she saw the kitchen, and her thoughts crystalized. Weapons. Some part of her innately realized that in a situation like this she had to stay focused, keep herself occupied with tasks to be done, or fear might overtake her. She ran into the kitchen and began pulling knives out of the knife block.

“Wh-what's going on?!” asked Charity. “Who was that?”

“That was the stranger I told you about,” replied Alicia. She noticed the kitchen phone, and snatched it up. Her heart sank, and her eyes met Maxine's as she reported, “It's dead.”

Thinking of something, Maxine knelt down and asked Charity, eye to eye, “Charity, does your dad have a gun?”

“I think so.”

“Do you know where he keeps it?”

“No,” Charity answered. “Plus he keeps it locked up anyway.”

Maxine looked down at the floor, crestfallen, then smiled and stood up. “That's okay. We won't need it. We're going to be fine.”

Once Alicia had selected the two biggest, sturdiest knives, she brought them over and handed one to Maxine. “You were awesome back there, Maxine. I didn't know you had a switchblade. You saved our lives.”

Maxine looked slightly embarrased. “It's for self-defense,” she said. “What, you don't have one?”

“No...” said Alicia. “I, I guess I never really thought I'd need to defend myself like that. Usually I try to defuse a situation before things get violent...”

This seemed to irritate Maxine, and she took out her phone with an angry huff. “I'm sure that would have gone well! It's really easy talking things over with a guy who communicates with growls and heavy breathing!” Alicia was startled by this, left wondering if it was something she said.

Maxine dialed a three digit number and held the phone to her ear. After waiting a second, she said, “Hello, we need the police! There's a-”

Crash! The glass door exploded inward, reduced in an instant to a million shards of flying glass. A thrown shovel was the cause of its demise, puncturing the illusion of safety the house offered with little effort. Its cutting edge was aimed directly at Maxine.

The girl threw herself to the floor. The shovel flew over her and embedded itself in the wall behind her. If she'd been a second too slow, she'd have been pinned there like a butterfly in an entomologist's collection.

“There's a, there's a...” she rambled into the phone, trying to reclaim her train of thought. The stranger stepped into the room through the jagged portal, his boot crunching on broken glass. The light of the dining room made him no less enigmatic, his hood covering his face completely and his cloak covering the rest of him. The only new thing revealed to them was the hulking extent of his build, which probably had about as much mass as all three of the girls put together.

“There's a psycho...some kind of fucking psycho!” continued Maxine, as he began walking toward her. “He's in the house, he's-”

As the stranger drew closer, she suddenly found she couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe. Then, he walked past her. To the shovel. He grabbed onto it, and wrenched it out of the wall with one forceful yank. “He's trying to kill us! We're at...” She suddenly blanked on the address. She looked at Charity in a panic.

“42 Birch!” shouted Charity.

“We're at-”

Whang! The stranger swung the shovel like a golf club, the flat of its blade hitting Maxine like a frying pan to the stomach. Her vision tunneled, her breath was forced from her lungs, and the phone was jostled from her fingers. It clattered to the floor. The stranger raised the shovel high, then stabbed the edge downward, slicing her phone in two with a plastic crunch.

Alicia grabbed Maxine under her arms and helped her up. “Come on, Maxine, run! Run!”

Maxine got her boots under her and after a few dragging steps was able to run under her own power. The three girls fled the dining room, ran through the living room, and closed the door behind them. Alicia grabbed a small hallway table and forced it under the doorknob.

“Shit...my phone,” gasped Maxine, still laboring a little for air. “Now...now what?”

“I don't know,” said Alicia. They still had their knives, but they weren't sure what good such weapons would be against that beast of a man and his long-reaching weapon.

The knob turned. All three girls screamed. A slight push, met with resistance. The knob went still. They waited, saying nothing, daring not even to breathe. Nothing happened.

“I don't know,” repeated Alicia, emotional exhaustion in her voice.

“What about your phone?” asked Maxine.

Alicia took a second to recall. “Upstairs. Charity's room. In my bag.” She grabbed Maxine's arm. “But we can't go up there. That's a dead end. I haven't seen as many horror movies as you have, but I've seen enough. We should just get out of here. Just leave. My car's right out front.”

“Yeah...” said Maxine. “Yeah, maybe you're right about that.”

Charity held Alicia's hand as they walked down the hall to the foyer. “Aw, I bet Maxine could take that big jerk on!” Charity insisted. “I say we stay and fight!”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Maxine replied, smiling wanly. “But I really doubt it.”

“But you're a badass!” praised Charity. “I bet you've never lost a fight!”

“Well, no, I guess I haven't,” said Maxine. “But the only people I've ever fought were girls who talked trash about me, and they were all prissy bitches who probably never got in a fight in their lives, like Alicia here.” She had that same edge to her voice that she'd had before. Granted, Maxine often had an edge to her voice when she spoke to Alicia, but this one still sounded a bit different.

Mary Rose's innocuous face came immediately to Alicia's mind. “I've been in a fight before,” she said defensively. “And I won, too.”

“Sure you did.”

“I'm serious!”

“Really. Well, what went wrong, why didn't you just defuse that situation before it came to that?” asked Maxine sarcastically.

Alicia had tried. A little. But she also didn't really have much of a chance of reasoning with Mary Rose. Maybe she could have done it, but maybe she couldn't have. She thought of Chase again. Chase was someone who always had her physical strength to fall back on. It must have made Chase feel very safe. Chase would have felt very secure, going up against this stranger. She wouldn't have been shaking like Alicia was, she wouldn't have been fighting through each step as fear threatened to paralyze her. If she got out of this alive, maybe Alicia would ask Chase to teach her a little self-defense.

The power went out. Charity screamed. Alicia wanted to, but she stayed silent, and gave Charity's hand a reassuring squeeze. “It's okay, Charity. We're almost to my car. It's going to be fine.”

They reached the entryway. Maxine went first. She stopped in front of a heavy wooden bookcase, glancing at the stairs and up at the second floor to make sure the stranger wasn't there. The coast was clear, so gripped the handle of the front door. “Alright Charity, when I open the door, Alicia's going to run to her car, and you're going to follow her, okay? Just run after her as fast as you can. I'll be right behind you.”

“O-okay.”

Maxine opened the door, and Alicia ran out. The front light came on. She heard Charity's light steps crunch the gravel behind her, followed by Maxine's heavier ones. Her eyes darted around at the semicircle of soft light the front light generated. No one there. No one there, but she could feel his eyes on her from somewhere in the darkness, from somewhere beyond that hazy boundary where the light ended and the night's domain began.

Alicia's car was parked near the light's periphery. She unlocked it with a button press on her keychain as they drew close, and opened the door.

“Don't get in! Check the backseat!” shouted Maxine.

Just as Alicia looked in the backseat, the front light went off. Charity clutched her leg in terror. “Make it come back on!” she shouted. Maxine cursed, then went back and waved to activate it again. Alicia's heart pounded, afraid of what she'd see.

The light came on. The backseat was empty.

Alicia exhaled. “Okay, get in, Charity! Get in!”

Charity ran around to the passenger side and Alicia hopped behind the wheel. By the time Maxine slipped in the back, Alicia was turning the key in the ignition.

The engine churned, did not quite awaken. Alicia tried again. Then again. “No, come on, come on...” The front light went off. With each attempt, more haste and desperation was expressed through her fingers. “Come on, you...”

“Forget it, he fucked with the engine,” said Maxine.

“What about your car?”

“I don't have it. My friends dropped me off here.”

“Wh...what do we do then?” asked Charity.

Looking back at the front door, it seemed a lot farther away now. “I think we have to go back inside,” said Alicia. “We have to get to my phone. Don't you think, Maxine?”

“Yeah.”

“Can't we just stay here?” asked Charity.

It did feel safe there. It felt safe in the car. Alicia had always felt safe in the car, even when she was little, riding with her parents. There was something about that enclosed space that felt protective. But she had to remind herself that safety was an illusion. They were vulnerable. The stranger could come from any darkened direction, could access them from any direction by simply breaking a window. It was safer inside.

“No,” said Alicia. “We have to go back in the house.”