Free Madelyn's Nephew by Ike Hamill

Madelyn’s legs started to go numb right away. If she had to run, it was going to be a bad scene.
    She held her breath and listened.
    The clicking began.
    The light leaking under her cabinet door flickered. It was a good thing she hadn’t turned off the environmental controls. The hot water circulating through the baseboard heat might be the only thing that kept her alive.
    The clicking grew louder.
    Madelyn had to take a breath. If she waited any longer, she was going to pass out.
    She heard the creaking of the laundry closet door.
    Madelyn squeezed her eyes shut. The next sound would be Jacob being disintegrated. She couldn’t bear the thought. Madelyn balled her hands into fists and resolved to burst out of her cabinet. Numb legs or not, she would fight the things before she let them take Jacob away. It was likely they would both die, but that would be preferable to living with the memory that she had gotten him killed.
    Logic wouldn’t let her act until she heard him scream. As long as there was a chance that he evaded the things, she wasn’t going to sacrifice herself.
    The waiting was torture.  
    The door creaked again and the clicking grew even louder.  
    Madelyn bit down on the side of her own hand. The pain helped her keep control.  
    The clicking stopped.
    Out of surprise more than anything else, Madelyn gasped for air.
    She pushed open the cabinet door. The basement was empty. She dragged her numb legs under herself and steadied against the wall as she stood. The door to the laundry closet was wide open. Jacob was gone. She rushed over.
    The room was barely bigger than the machine it housed. Madelyn turned back towards the stairs, prepared to run on her shaky legs so she could find her nephew.  
    The door to the washing machine clicked and then swung open. Jacob began to climb out.
    “That was close,” he said.
    Madelyn exhaled.
    “I thought they had you.”
    “You didn’t see me through the glass?”
    She shook her head.
    “I’ll go lock the door.”

Chapter 10
{Oslo}

    I T WAS BLACK OUTSIDE .  
    Madelyn set up the screen so that most of it showed the upstairs living room and the front door. They found blankets and put them in their hiding places. She asked the house to turn up the heat, hoping that a higher temperature inside would mean less heat expelled through the roof vent.
    They had nothing to do but wait.  
    Neither of them wanted to sleep. The Roamers could come back at any second.
    “What do you think happened to your sister?” Madelyn asked.
    Jacob scratched the side of his nose with a finger.
    He shook his head.
    “I don’t know. There are a lot of possibilities that Dad talked about. It might have been her time, you know? They came in waves. Nobody would walk off for months or even a year, and then four would go in the course of a week. Dad said it was contagious.”
    “People would walk off?”
    Jacob nodded. “Some of the old folks called it Desperation, like it was a real disease. We caught one boy, Everett, and wrestled him back to the base. He was trying to walk off. People sat him down—his friends and his parents—and tried to talk sense into him. Every time we left him alone, he would try to walk away again.”
    “Did he say why?”
    “He denied it. We caught him down by the castle and Wahid shook him and yelled at him. Everett just blinked and then said, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ like nothing had happened. We told him that he had wandered out into the street and he said that was crazy.”
    “So he was in a trance or something?”
    Jacob shrugged. “Desperation.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “Eventually, Everett disappeared.”
    “Nobody knows where?”
    “Not with him. There was one girl that they followed. I didn’t know her. I heard about it later. They waited for her to walk away and they sent a unit to follow her. She walked right through the middle of an infiltrated park. Nothing touched her. Then, when she got to the other side, she went behind a car