“What if...” said Maxine, looking across the street, “The neighbors...” But she knew this was a bad idea too. If they tried to run for it, the stranger would get them before they could even leave the driveway. They had to assume he was out there, waiting for them to try that. Everything they did, they had to proceed under the assumption that he could be anywhere. If they didn't, they wouldn't survive long.

Then, the front light came on.

None of the three girls had moved from the car, none were in the position to trigger it. They froze in their seats, not breathing.

There was no one in the semicircle of light. It looked perfectly safe outside, no different than it had when Alicia had first arrived. They knew it was anything but.

SMASH! The blade of the shovel shattered the back window. An impact like a sledgehammer into Maxine's shoulder, instantly followed by an explosion of pain. The shovel had bisected her shoulder blade as easily as it had her phone, but the pain had scattered her thoughts to the point where all she understood was that feeling. To her, it felt as though she'd been split wide open, split in two.

An arm wrapped around her throat, choking off a scream in the crook of its elbow as it pulled her out of the vehicle.

“Maxine!” shouted Alicia, throwing her door open and stumbling out of the car.

The stranger threw Maxine facedown onto the gravel, the shovel still protruding from her back. He grabbed the handle, raised his boot, and stomped down on the shovel's step.

Another burst of pain, a feeling of being split even wider. Maxine wailed a tortured scream, a sustained note which degraded into a gasping cough.

The man raised his boot to stomp again, but Alicia intervened. With three long, fast, gymnastic strides, Alicia jumped up onto the hood of her car, then onto the roof, then sprang off and landed on her shins on the stranger's shoulders. She raised her knife, and stabbed it into the back of his neck.

Thick skin. Muscle and bone. It was harder than she expected to penetrate it, and the knife went in shallow. She yanked it out and stabbed again, this time with all the arm strength she had.

The blade went in much deeper on this attempt. With a shriek of pain, the man reached up and tossed Alicia off of him. The redhead hit the gravel and rolled, knife still in hand.

She came up near the motionless Maxine. Alicia whimpered and looked away; the wound looked so much more horrible up close. She found Maxine's face instead. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. There was a lot of red on the gravel around them, and her skin looked even paler than usual.

“Maxine! Maxine!” called Alicia, patting her lightly on the cheeks. “Come on, stay with me. You're okay.”

Maxine's eyes opened with reassuring ease. “It hurts...” she croaked.

“I'm sure it does,” said Alicia. She heard a crash, then whipped her head around to look over her shoulder. It was the stranger, collapsing from his injuries. Alicia couldn't believe her fortune.

There was a click as Charity emerged from the car. The girl looked at Maxine and said, “Oh no...Oh my gosh...”

“It's not that bad, Charity. It's not that bad, okay?” persuaded Alicia, both for Charity's benefit and for Maxine's. “Help me get her inside.”

Alicia put Maxine's good arm around her shoulders and did her best to help her up. With her and Charity's assistance, Maxine could sort of stand, which Alicia found reassuring. Walking was another matter, but after the first few yards Maxine got her feet under her and was able to help Alicia and Charity a little bit.

As they crossed the threshold into the house, Alicia looked back over her shoulder at the stranger. He was still lying in the driveway, not moving, when the front light switched off.

….........

Alicia sat Maxine down on the floor of Charity's room and moved Charity's dresser in front of the door as a barricade. Charity brought her a pair of her old jeans, and Alicia used them to dress Maxine's wound. As expected, there was still no power, so the only light Alicia had to work by was the half moon and the ambient light pollution from the neighboring houses.

“How's that?” asked Alicia, after cinching together the two pant legs into a simple knot. She knew nothing about dressing a wound, aside from grasping the concept: losing blood is bad, so if somebody is, you should cover the hole with something. “Should it be tighter?” In movies they always made the dressing tight.

“It's fine... I think I'm okay... It...probably hurts worse than it actually is,” said Maxine wearily. Her voice sounded like she'd taken in a mouthful of gravel when she hit the ground. “Thanks, Alicia. That was a pretty good jump.”

Alicia laughed. “I just acted without thinking. I can't believe it worked.”

“You're lucky you're not dead,” said Maxine. If Alicia didn't know better, she'd say she sounded worried. “Why would you risk your neck for me like that?”

“Maxine, I couldn't just let that guy kill you,” Alicia said.

“Why not?” asked Maxine. “Weren't you scared? Weren't you the least bit concerned you might DIE helping me?”

Alicia sat up, remaining facing her on her knees, and considered this. “Well, I was really scared when we were in the car together, wondering when he was going to come. If you'd asked me if I could do something like jump on that guy and stab him a couple seconds before it happened, I probably would have said no. I'd have said I'd be paralyzed with fear, that I'd want to help but I'd be too scared, that only somebody like Chase could do something like that. But once he had you, I wasn't thinking about myself anymore. I was thinking about saving you. In a way, it was kind of a relief. It felt good to act, and not have time to think and worry.”

Maxine watched the faint shape of Alicia's face as she explained. She listened to Alicia's words, considered them seriously, with the goal of better understanding the girl they came from. She was dying for a smoke. Alicia picked up one of Charity's shirts. “Here, hold still, let me clean you up...Your mascara's a mess...”

With a frown, Maxine replied, “Weren't you gonna get your phone?”

Alicia had forgotten all about it. “Right! My phone! Yeah!” She started crawling around, feeling in the dark for her bag. “I'll get you an ambulance, and the cops too...”

“Hell, why don't you call Chase?” asked Maxine. “Based on what I saw at Harvest, she's probably better than the cops.”

Alicia hesitated. “We can't call Chase. She's hanging out with Torey tonight. I don't want to ruin her eveni-”

At the word 'Torey,' Maxine interjected, “Call her! Hurry up and call her!”

Alicia's laugh was cut abruptly short when she came across her bag. It was overturned, its contents spilled on the floor. Her phone was split in two the same way Maxine's now was. The stranger had beaten her to it.

“Oh no...” she murmured.

“N-now what?” asked Charity fearfully.

“I...I don't know,” answered Alicia.

“I think we're safe here for a while,” said Maxine. “That dresser should hold, and when I saw him he didn't look like he was getting up any time soon.”

“Maybe...” said Alicia, “Maybe we should try talking to him? See what he wants-”

“Talk to him?!” echoed Maxine incredulously, suddenly lit up. “See what he wants?! There you go again! Are you stupid or something? I can tell you right now what he wants, he wants to kill us! Or worse! When are you going to join us in the real world and realize that your cute little cheerleader charms can't fix everything?”

Alicia listened to her, felt that edge in her voice again. She decided to just ask her pointedly, “Why are you mad?”

Maxine frowned. She reached for her cigarettes involuntarily, glanced at Charity, then just clutched the pack in her hand. “I just don't know how can you afford to be so innocent. So trusting. All I can figure is that you had a really easy life.”

“An easy life?” asked Alicia. “I don't know what you...”

“What I mean is you've never been tested. It must be really easy to trust that every jerk you come across can be reasoned with, that every confrontation you find yourself in can be 'defused,' when you're miss popular, never been bullied, spending your whole life with everybody at school kissing your ass and loving being on your good side.”

Maxine was making quite a few assumptions, but she was also, admittedly, correct in them. Alicia understood why Maxine would see her worldview as one befitting a hothouse flower. She let Maxine speak, feeling attacked, but also a bit humbled.

“You're not so different from Charity, you can believe in the power of friendship and that your girls will have your back or whatever because you've spent your whole life sheltered from reality, the harshness of human nature. You never had to deal with the mean bitches at school picking on you, so you were never forced to ask 'Huh, which of my girls had my back right there?' You never saw all your friends turn on you so they wouldn't get the same treatment as you, so you were never forced to admit, 'I guess the power of friendship wasn't with me today.'

“I'm the perfect example. You think acting all sweet and nice to me is going to fix me. You think pretending you want to be my friend will make me suddenly forget my trauma and be buddy buddy with you. I'm obligated to like you, right? You're YOU after all! Well, it isn't that easy. My problems aren't that trivial that a few nice sentimentalities will make them go away.”

Alicia was stung by Maxine's words, but she also sensed the hurt behind them. She sat down next to Maxine, and gently took her hand, pushing the package of cigarettes out and onto the floor.

Maxine didn't pull away. She looked at her her hand, then at Alicia, then down at her lap, squinting away tears.

“I guess it just...makes me mad that you would be so careless with that innocence. Girls like you are the ones who end up trapped in abusive relationships because “oh, he's just misunderstood.” You don't recognize how special it is, what you have. You need to protect it, Alicia. You need to be more guarded. You need to be less trusting, you need to keep the world at arm's length. You need to be more like me. You're...you're just so damn sweet. It makes me mad to think of you getting hurt...because you were too stupid to protect yourself.”

After that, she was silent. Alicia gave enough time to be sure she was done, before saying, “Maxine, thank you for being worried about me. You know I'm worried about you, too. We need to be worried about each other to make it out of here.”

Her thumb caressed the lines of Maxine's palm. “I want you to know I'm not trying to fix you. I'm not a therapist, I'm not qualified for that. I'd never assume that I could change you or convince you to like me.” She smiled. “You can call me cheer nazi forever if you want!”

Maxine laughed. The icy atmosphere in the room cracked a little bit. “Good, because I intend to.”

“I just choose to be nice to you because that's the way I am. I try to be nice to people, but I also try to understand them. And, you know, I admit I don't understand all the hard things you've been through. I probably never will. But if you talk to me about them, I can at least promise you I'll try. I think I understand a little better, now that you told me what you just did.

“That's kind of what I mean when I talk about defusing a situation or saying 'why don't we try talking to him?' It doesn't mean I'm blindly trusting someone. What it's really about is understanding. I don't think everybody out there is a saint deep down inside or that they have some sense of decency that I can appeal to. I just think that everybody has a reason for the way they are and the things they do. I don't think that's an idealistic thing to say at all. I think that if I can approach people with an open mind and be sympathetic to them, hear what they're saying and understand their motive for what they're doing, then a LOT will make sense to me. That's knowledge that can be helpful to me in my own life. In this instance, I think that means I'll know what to do to escape this guy. I don't know, does that make sense?”

Maxine realized she was staring as she listened. She let go of Alicia's hand, and picked up her pack of cigarettes. “Can I smoke in here?” she asked Charity bluntly.

“Be my guest,” said Charity.

Maxine lit up. Alicia's eyes were used to the dark, and the flame of her lighter seemed very bright, bright enough to illuminate Maxine's face and torso in the brief moment it was lit. After it went out, the ember of her smoke remained as a glowing orange dot in the dark. “So you think understanding this nut is the key to stopping him. Is that what I'm hearing?”

“Yeah! Yeah, I think it is!” said Alicia. “Now come on, what's everything we know about this guy?”