Survival

Epilogue

Numb.

White walls surrounding her.

A metal bench biting into her skin through the white linen clothing her body.

White.

It burned her eyes, peeled away the color in her memories.

Even as she dug her nails into her palms, she could barely feel it.

Measured footsteps echoing down the hallway.

Her throat was hoarse; her voice dwindled down to a bloody rasp.

She could yell no more.

She felt no more.

Stephanie wasn't even sure she was really alive.

***

When Liam was coherent enough to recognize the cracked walls, the dingy windows and the springs pressing into his back, he knew he had failed. With a sense of empty darkness that washed over him, he knew it. Just for a moment, he'd thought that maybe good could prevail over evil. But was it as simple as that?

As twisted as it was, were all of these killers actually evil? Just misunderstood? Because Liam had been ready to kill Derek if he'd had to, he was sure. Did that make him just as bad? Worse?

But he'd gotten his face smashed in; his ribs cracked and had lain in the street like a discarded doll. All to protect the girl that had once been his constant companion, his best friend. And she had chosen someone else over him without a moment's thought.

Had left him in the street, staring sightlessly up at the stars.

Paramedics had peeled him off the sidewalk. People he didn't know had comforted him until he was released from an antiseptic smelling building filled with the dying, the sick.

And where else could he go but back to Ana's place?

He couldn't go back to the streets. He just didn't have the will to do it.

So, defeated, he'd signed out AMA and slipped out, undetected, narrowly managing to evade the police outside the hospital.

He woke up in a house, filled with desperate people ready to kill just to stay alive, and thought that maybe, maybe he was one of them too.

***

Alexei sat on a metal bed in the dark, springs easily felt through the mattress. Other kids slept there too. Abandoned. Alone. Waiting in limbo without somewhere to call home but the bunks they slept on.

At the time, she'd played along with her sister's act, but she didn't understand. Why couldn't they be together? Why had Stephanie looked at her so disinterestedly? As if she didn't matter?

Why did she say they weren't sisters?

Did she not want Alexei to be there with her anymore?

Alexei had thought, had hoped, that once she found her sister that they could all be together again. Be like a real family like they used to. But Stephanie hadn't even looked at her. And now Alexei was sitting in the dark, listening to the sounds of sleeping kids just like her. Unwanted.

Some of them had been here forever.

Alexei didn't want to be swallowed up by the dark. She didn't want to be lost in this maze.

Forgotten.

***

"So what happened to her?" Daniel asked his mom.

He probably shouldn't care. He should probably be more worried that his father, his father, had died in the middle of the street and that they were sitting at the funeral, a week later. But the reason that his father had died was to save his son, and the reason he'd had to be saved was that he'd gone after the girl that he, well, he'd...

It no longer mattered.

And yet, it still did.

His mother's makeup was perilously close to smearing, as the tears glittered in her eyes. "Not now, Daniel."

She sounded tired. So weary and old and there was nothing Daniel could do to stop that. There was nothing he could do to help her, or anyone else.

Diana sat rigidly beside him, her jaw set and her eyes fierce. Her father had fallen too, and she was the only one left. She had no one, only Daniel, and so he let her take solace in his presence.

"Why not now?" Daniel asked.

He couldn't even understand why he was pressing the issue. There had been plenty of time for these questions, between the investigations and the insurance and the nights lying alone in his room, listening to his mother cry across the hallway.

Stephanie had haunted him, but all he could think about was his father.

And now that he was buried and closure had been given (or as much as anyone could hope to have in light of recent events), Daniel couldn't take his mind off the girl that had caused all of this.

The girl he'd condemned nearly without thought, fear for the people around him ruling his head, resentment- unjustified as it was- for her role in his father's death. Logically, he knew that it was himself that he had been angry at. For going after her. He just couldn't bring himself to regret it, either.

There were times when he looked back, in the dark of night, when the guilt gnawed at his stomach and threatened to devour him wholly, and he questioned if he had made the right choice.

Then, he wondered, what was the right choice? Was there such a thing?

His choice- the choice he had made for himself and for her, not trusting her to do the right thing, but instead forcing it upon her- it had been inevitable. Hadn't it?

Then, he wondered, what would have happened had he stuck with her?

A yawning chasm of uncertainty, a black void of the unknown opened up in the center of his mind. He acknowledged that he'd never know. But it never failed to eat him up inside until he was fully awake, his stomach roiling with guilt, his chest aching with regret. In the dark, he was alone, alone with only the words in his mind and on the paper.

"Daniel," Miranda snapped. "For god's sake be quiet about the girl."

Daniel wondered if he would have chosen a different path, had he not met her at all. What if his father had been destined to die anyway? No. He couldn't believe that. His father's death had meant something, had happened for something damn it. Even if Daniel hadn't figured out quite what yet.

Was his choice to keep Steinbeck's novel on the table by his bed a reach out to a girl he had condemned? A silent call, asking for forgiveness? The well-worn, yellowing pages of the book were graced by his hands many a night after the funeral. Questions unanswered filled the pages with invisible ink, questions for a girl that would not be found. A story of many lonely people, in a lonely age, etched in isolation, hatred and ending in tragedy.

Daniel shut his mouth, staring as people melted away, the service over. The broken remnants of families and individuals stayed. Caroline buried her face in Aaron's chest, her makeup smeared and her face red. It was the closest Daniel had come to seeing her unwound and anything but perfect.

But she, too, was alone.

Then again, weren't they all?