The silence inside the church was heavy, broken only by the soft sound of Kelly's breathing.
Sitting on the first worn wooden pew, she kept her eyes closed, her hands clasped together in her lap.
The smell of old wax and dust lingered in the air as she prayed for Brian.
It wasn't a prayer born of longing, but a plea for forgiveness for the resentment still burning in her chest, mixed with the horror of the image of his body on that stone slab.
Ten minutes passed. When she finally opened her eyes, Kelly blinked several times, trying to clear the moisture blurring her vision before looking over her shoulder.
Only one pew was occupied, two rows behind hers. Kenny was there, his elbows resting on his knees, his gaze lowered to the floor, appearing like someone in no hurry to go anywhere.
"Are the others gone?" she asked, her voice rougher than usual.
As if awakening from his own trance, Kenny raised his head.
"Yeah. They went to Colony House."
"You didn't have to stay." Kelly turned her body to face him better. "You can go if you want. Seriously."
"I don't mind." He shrugged, almost too casually for the weight of his answer. "Either way, I'll know what happened afterward. Unless... you want to be alone for a while. If that's the case, I can give you some space."
"No. It's okay." She hesitated, rubbing her palms together. "Do you think that radio is going to work?"
Kenny took a few seconds to answer. As he rubbed the back of his neck, he carefully chose his words.
"I want to believe it will. Everyone worked really hard on it. But... things in this town rarely go the way we expect."
He adjusted his posture and added, "Do you want to go see?"
Kelly immediately shook her head.
"I don't want to be surrounded by people looking at me with pity and asking if I'm okay. I'm not okay. And I don't want to pretend I am."
"Fair enough." Kenny let out a short laugh, completely devoid of humor.
He understood. He didn't feel comfortable surrounded by the crowd either, receiving sympathetic looks, especially when practically everyone knew about the feelings he had for Kristi.
Silence once again filled the church. This time, however, it was a shared silence, strangely comfortable.
"How did you get here?" Kelly asked, studying his tired features. "Has it been a long time?"
"Five months." Kenny leaned back. "My dad was getting worse with age. They diagnosed him with dementia. One night, he had one of his worst episodes and managed to take a bus by himself to Austin."
His voice lost some of its emotion, becoming almost automatic, like someone who had repeated the story so many times that he had learned to protect himself from it.
"My mom and I drove there to get him. On the way back to College Station, we saw the fallen tree in the middle of the road."
The mere mention of the tree sent a shiver down her spine. To Kelly, that tree was the symbol of how the entire nightmare had begun.
"I saw your mother this morning." Kelly spoke softly. "She seemed really worried about you. She seems like a very nice person."
"She is." For the first time since the conversation began, Kenny smiled genuinely. "I'll introduce you later."
"I'd love that."
Kelly swallowed hard as she remembered her own mother, and her eyes filled with tears again.
"My mom... when I left home for this trip, she followed me out onto the porch. She wanted to give me a goodbye hug, but I refused. I was so angry. We'd just had a fight about Brian."
A thick tear rolled down her cheek and fell onto her dirty jeans.
"She said she didn't like him." Her voice began to falter as sobs formed in her throat again. "That he wasn't a good boyfriend... that she had a bad feeling about him. I should've listened to my mom. I should've gone back and given her that hug."
She covered her face with both hands as her shoulders trembled, unable to hold back the sobs.
Kenny remained still for a moment, unsure how to react.
His gaze wandered around the church as if, somewhere, there might be an invisible manual teaching him what to do in a situation like this.
In the end, empathy overcame his awkwardness. Kenny stood, approached the front pew, and, still hesitant, wrapped his arms around Kelly's shoulders, offering an awkward but sincere hug.
Kelly rested her forehead against his shoulder and finally let out the frustration she had been trying to suppress.
Only after several long minutes did her breathing begin to steady. She slowly pulled away and wiped her face with the backs of her hands.
"Thank you," she murmured between sniffles. "And I'm sorry about that."
"Don't worry about it." Kenny withdrew his arm, still a little awkward. He avoided meeting her eyes for a moment longer than necessary before clearing his throat. "Did you eat anything at Colony House?"
"No."
"Want to go to the diner and try to eat something?"
"I'm not hungry." Kelly stood, smoothing out her wrinkled clothes. "But... could you show me around town? Walking for a while might help clear my head."
"Sure."
Kenny stood as well.
"Let's go."
The two left the church, walking side by side.
…
At Colony House, the crowd remained packed around the radio, while the hiss of static filled the space, taking the place of the answer everyone was waiting to hear.
A few minutes later, the soldier's voice returned, confirming that he had checked Boyd's record and found information about the disappearance of the Matthews family.
"What exactly is your situation?"
The sheriff answered without hesitation.
"We saw a fallen tree in the road. After that, no one can leave."
"How many people are there with you?"
"About a hundred," Boyd continued. "I don't know our location. Everyone who arrived here saw that same tree on a different road somewhere in the United States."
"And why can't you simply leave?"
"The place works like a loop." Boyd carefully chose each word, trying to maintain a rational tone despite the absurdity of what he was describing. "It doesn't matter which road we take to get out. They all curve around and bring us back to the same point in town. We're surrounded by a dense forest."
On the other end of the transmission, there was a brief pause.
"And what about what Mr. Matthews mentioned earlier... about monsters?"
"It's true." Boyd's fingers tightened around the microphone. "There are things that only come out at night. They attack people."
He chose not to mention the talismans or explain exactly what those creatures were capable of.
Saying they were all trapped after encountering a fallen tree already sounded insane enough for a first conversation.
"Listen." The sheriff cast a quick glance toward the darkening horizon. "I don't know how long we'll be able to keep this transmission going. There's a very strong storm heading our way. We need rescue."
"Understood, Stevens. I'll pass this information along to my superiors. We'll begin frequency tracking to try to triangulate the location of your signal. Keep the radio on."
The transmission went silent, and a wave of hope and apprehension swept across the lawn.
On the porch, Ellis wrapped his arms around Fatima. They shared the same expression, caught between newly awakened hope and a fear neither of them could name.
The passengers from the bus, who had arrived less than a day ago, let out sighs of relief. Some cast discreet glances at the older residents, trapped there for months, some for years, with a pity that was difficult to hide.
Even Daniel felt a faint stab of doubt. It was quick, unsettling, and vaguely irritating simply because it existed.
The script he knew said this would end in failure, followed by a sinister voice mocking Jim.
Yet there was a military officer checking real credentials in a database.
Could my interference have changed the script this much?
It didn't take long for the wind to begin blowing harder. The dark clouds, previously confined to the horizon, swallowed the entire sky and blotted out the last traces of daylight. The first drops fell, thick and cold.
Almost instinctively, Jim opened an umbrella and positioned it over the radio, trying to protect the equipment.
At the same time, Tabitha took Ethan by the hand and hurried him beneath the porch.
The static returned, now louder and distorted.
"Attention, unidentified station. This is Captain Reynolds." The new voice was deeper and carried authority. "Sergeant Stevens. We found records in our database of other people who claimed to have escaped from a place similar to the one you described. We haven't been able to locate the exact source of your signal yet, but we're still trying."
Boyd exchanged a quick glance with Khatri.
The wind grew even stronger, whipping the wires scattered across the ground from side to side as the rain turned into a downpour.
"We need to be quick." Boyd raised his voice to be heard over the storm. "Is there any way for us to get out of here? Anything in those reports you have?"
The answer took a few seconds.
"According to the information we have, the people who managed to escape mentioned entering a cave."
Daniel rolled his eyes before he even realized he had done it.
[A magical cave that appears overnight. And, magically, an official voice tells the lab rats to go inside it. The screenwriter of this world has really given up on subtlety.]
"Literally," Daniel said, watching the movement around him. "They shove the cheese into the mousetrap and then put a giant neon sign pointing toward the entrance."
Lightning tore across the sky, followed almost immediately by the deafening crack of thunder.
The next gust ripped the umbrella from Jim's hands and sent it flying through the air, turned inside out and spinning in the wind like a broken toy.
"Quick! We have to protect the radio!" he shouted, trying to cover the equipment with his own body.
From the door of Colony House, Donna shouted for everyone to get inside, but much of the crowd remained frozen in place, too hypnotized by the transmission to react.
The audio began to fail again. The voice on the other end came through in broken fragments, reduced to scattered syllables.
"Repeat!" Boyd shouted, trying to maintain contact. "Is there another way out? Besides the cave?"
The reply came completely garbled, swallowed by interference, until silence took over the frequency.
Boyd, Jade, and Jim reacted at the same time. They hurriedly gathered the equipment, struggling with the cables tangling around one another, before running inside the house. The rest of the crowd finally gave in to common sense and followed them.
Amid the confusion, only two people went in the opposite direction.
Daniel laced his fingers with Julie's. A brief glance was enough for both of them to understand that they shared the same suspicion.
Together, they crossed the lawn toward the motorhome, leaving behind the chaos and the false hopes.
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