||Series Removed|| OTB

6 - A Life Still Lived

6

Rolling the limp old woman onto her back, I briefly tried to snap Joyce into consciousness before stepping aside to collect myself. She couldn’t be dead… Beth was only trying to protect me, I should never have let things escalate out of control in the first place.

If it was anyone else blasting that shotgun at me, I would’ve returned fire on the spot. The fact that I hesitated because of the woman's age, it showed that I was still weak.

A broad shadow came into view beside the lobby's door to the garage, hovering above Tomás as it stepped over his body carelessly. Slowly approaching the scene, a sharp inhale told me that the man had already seen everything.

“J… Joyce… Honey… What have they done to you?!” Falling to his feet, Harold Todd crawled helplessly towards his wife, his brittle bones cracking as he went. I considered doing a runner with Beth to find the others, but for some reason it felt… disrespectful.

“It… It wasn’t supposed to happen like that…” I stuttered, trying to justify what we’d done. “She was trying to kill me, said she wouldn’t let us leave. You need to understand… Beth needs to be with her aunt. She can’t be your Caroline anymore.”

The little girl held back another choked cry, and shook her head in correction. “N-No, Mister… It won’t end here.” Her eyes darted spitefully to Harold, who was caressing his wife’s aged face in mourning. “…Not until he lets the others go.”

Almost as though she'd realised some kind of opportunity in the midst of the tragedy, Beth darted off to the garage as Harold’s head spun around, the rage pumping through the throbbing veins on his forehead was apparent. “Caroline…!! You get back here this instant! How dare you strike your mother like that!!”

Sliding across the garage’s littered floor and slamming her body into the latched basement door in the far corner of the room, Beth scrambled to undo the many locks adorning the outside. She wasn't fast enough... Harold stormed through the workshop and smacked her recklessly aside with a pained roar.

“Don’t touch her!!” I spat at him as he turned his attention towards me, lifting a bloodied tire iron from his worktable. I was suddenly very aware of Alisha’s absence from the house during all of the commotion. “You son of a bitch… What did you do to my friends?!”

“Shut your mouth! You’re just a stupid kid, you have no idea what it really takes to care for those closest to you!!” He froze for a second, and my face must have reflected a flicker of sympathy for the grieving father as he huffed my pitiful expression off.

He must have realised that I knew who Caroline Todd really was… and why he was going so far to keep up this charade.

“…It was Joyce who started, at first. When the dead came... Thought that it would be nice to pretend, that we were safely hidden away in our old neighbourhood. Imagining that those things weren't wandering around outside our gate, waiting...”

Harold’s eyes were still trained on me, but I knew that he was mentally walking through the memories associated with this house.

“It escalated from there, and I tried to make myself believe it too as the months went by. We were living in our own past, where there weren’t any drifters or bandits… Then one day, my wife asked me if we could dream Caroline back into our lives.”

A light knock came from the small latched door, and it took me a second to process. Bolts and padlocks, on the entrance side? If the old couple weren't trying to keep people out of the basement... they must have been trying to lock something in.