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Hannah threw her backpack on the linoleum floor on the mall, falling to her knees next to it and checking over her shoulder to see if she’d been followed. Webby’s voice had fallen back into the clamor of her own fear, drowned out by the echo of Lex’s screams and Ethan’s desperate wheezing as she’d convulsed on the ground.
The hall she’d found herself in seemed mostly empty, and she wasn’t hearing, ‘get out, Hannah, you need to get out,’ like she had been before. So she clutched the backpack to her chest, breathing hard against it, and tried to calm herself down. It was quiet here, at least, even if she hated the way the thing in the backpack made her feel when she looked at it. It was staring into the eyes of everyone who’d ever called her stupid and useless, and he smelled like spoiled blood and her mom’s cigarettes– but Lex needed her to keep him safe.
Her heart was finally slowing down when she heard the metal clanking sound of a crash bar door being pushed open. Instinctively, she flinched hard and curled around the backpack, but there was no feral cry of anger, no footsteps sprinting down the hall to catch her and rip her apart. When she looked back up, one of the doors was open– and there was someone standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the weak yellow light behind them.
It was hard to see the blood on the black jacket, but stark when it was matted in white hair and dripping down a deathly-pale face. Their hand was gripping the door jamb, and it was swollen and bruised beneath leather gloves. Hannah swallowed, lowering the backpack.
“Ethan?”
She swayed and slumped against the doorway, smiling weakly around the dark blood spilling from her lips. Her eyes half-crinkled with it, but that was hard when one of them was swollen shut.
“...Who else?”
She drew in another rattling breath, but this time it hitched, the sound of lungs spasming desperately. Ethan choked and coughed, an awful, sickly sound, and blood spattered on the ground beneath her.
“Bad blood,” she said, and her voice shook.
“Mos’ of it’s bad, ‘sn’t it?”
Hannah had never seen someone look so hurt in her life. With her red-stained teeth and the way her words were starting to marble together, Ethan almost reminded her of her mom.
The comparison made her shudder, not needing to be reminded of that now. It was Ethan, and Ethan wasn’t supposed to hurt her. But when she stepped out of the doorway, she swayed on her feet, unsteady. Hannah wasn’t stupid like everyone said. She knew that when someone walked like that toward you, you were in trouble.
The door slammed shut behind Ethan and the room got just a little bit darker, and Hannah gasped shakily, instinctively scrambling back.
Ethan stopped, blinking, and lifted her thumb to her lips. It brought away a smudge of black lipstick and a glob of blood, shiny on her finger. She looked at it for a moment, then stumbled again, hand moving to brace against the wall next to her. Her hand left a red mark on the plaster.
“Shit. Hey, I, I prolly look scary righ’ now, huh, banana?” she slurred, and her working eye blinked like her mom’s did when she was trying to stay awake in front of the TV. The petals of the flower tattoo on the side of her face were colored in with blood. But that was wrong. California poppies were orange, not red.
“Yeah,” Hannah whimpered, clutching the backpack tighter.
“‘Kay,” Ethan said, looking down at the ground. Her shoes were leaving red prints on the tiles, the pattern of the soles ruined and messy from the way she was dragging her feet. “M’sorry. I w- I won’t hurt you, okay?”
Hannah wanted to believe her. Ethan’s voice usually didn’t lie to her, but slurred voices almost always did. She was wondering if she should be safe and just run away, when a voice finally breached the terrified buzz of her own thoughts. It was one that didn’t ever slur or stumble, and had never lied to her.
It’s okay. She’s telling the truth, she’s just hurting. Oh, Ethan…
Tentatively, Hannah nodded. “Webby says I can trust you.”
“C-cool,” Ethan said, and her bloody smile looked sincere. “Thanks, Webby.”
“She says you’re hurting.”
Ethan’s chest shook with a breathless, wheezing little laugh, and she pressed a trembling hand to the base of her throat, wincing. “Yeah, s’not great. But I’m gonna be fine, ‘kay banana?”
Hannah didn’t believe her. She didn’t look like she was gonna be fine.
The color of the blood made her remember a video they played in school, about how if they were really hurt or saw someone really hurt and there were no grown-ups around to tell, they should call 911 and listen to the instructions. She went home and told her mom about it, and her mom scowled around her cigarette and told her it was a lie. If she ever got hurt at home, she should deal with herself, because she didn’t want those nosey fucking bastards rooting around in her trailer, taking her beer and asking her questions.
“Banana? You okay?” Ethan asked, stopping again, and the way she said it through the blood on her teeth made everything feel backwards.
“I’m scared.”
Another small, hurting smile tugged at Ethan’s lips. “S’okay. I know. W-we’re gonna get outta here, though. Me, you, an’ Lex.”
Ethan took another step, and Hannah noticed that her leg was turned at a weird angle, bent like a pipe cleaner. That was swollen and bleeding too, and buckled when Ethan moved to lean against the wall again. She couldn’t stand up by herself.
“Promise,” Ethan reassured her, like she had to make up for just stumbling and falling against a wall to hold herself up. “Y-you still got that doll?”
Keep your voices down.
“Shh,” Hannah warned, fingers digging into the edge of the backpack.
“Huh?”
“Keep your voices down,” she repeated.
After a moment, realization shuttered over Ethan’s face, and she looked back over to the door she’d come through. “Can they… can they hear when we talk about it?”
Don’t risk it .
Hannah nodded. “Don’t risk it.”
She wanted to plead with Ethan, make sure that she believed her, so she didn’t get hurt again. But nothing she’d said before had ever made Webby seem real to anyone, so she gave up. Ethan would believe her when she was ready to. She just hoped that was now.
Thankfully, Ethan slowly nodded, a lock of bloodstained hair falling in front of her face.. “‘Kay. But m’guessing there’s… something important still in th- that backpack?” she asked. Hannah nodded, and Ethan relaxed with relief.
“Yeah. Once we- we find Lex, we’ll be okay. Jus’ gotta be brave for a little bit, huh?”
A lot of life was being brave, for Hannah. It felt like someday she would run out of bravery and she’d be all on her own, without Webby or the magic hat, just the dark and all her fear.
Still, she didn’t know if Ethan was talking about just Hannah, or both of them. So she nodded, and just as Ethan was taking another step closer, she heard the crash bar door open again. It wasn’t like when Ethan had opened it, this time it was violent, loud and sudden. Hannah recoiled again, shielding the backpack and preparing to run, but the cracked, panicked voice echoing through the hall was a familiar one.
“Hannah! Hannah! ”
“Lexi?” she called out. If it was her, that meant she was safe, even just for a little while longer.
Lex ran into the hall and slammed the door behind her, breathing fast and sharp, and her voice was trembling with fury. She’d heard Lex sound like that before, but she wasn’t looking at Hannah.
“Hey! If you don’t get the fuck away from my s–!”
Ethan turned around to face her, and Hannah could see Lex’s face as she stumbled to a halt, the anger giving way to terror in her expression. She’d seen Lex angry three hundred times, sometimes at her, sometimes at other things. She had almost never seen Lex scared.
“...Ethan,” she gasped.
“H- hey.”
“Ethan, I, I- oh my god,” she stammered, shoulders slumping as she hurried forward, already reaching to gently take Ethan’s wrist. “What’d they- what happened?”
Ethan shook her head, wiping more blood from her chin with her free hand. “Doesn’ matter.”
“Yes, it fucking does matter! You’re–”
Ethan turned her hand to take Lex’s, and Hannah could see the way her fingerprints stayed on Lex’s skin, next to the red rope marks scraped into Lex’s own wrists. “Not, not righ’ now. Hannah’s safe, we gotta leave ‘fore they catch up.”
Lex grit her teeth, a muscle tightening along her jaw, then huffed, stepping away from Ethan. “Fine, but you’re explaining this shit later. Once we’re safe.”
Then she turned to Hannah, who was still sitting on the ground, holding the backpack tightly. If she couldn’t help Ethan and all the blood on her, she could at least protect the doll.
“Hey banana, you okay?” she asked.
Hannah nodded. She was scared, but she wasn’t hurting, and definitely not like Ethan was.
“Good. We’re gonna leave now. There are people here looking for you, and not in a good way, but they’re looking for someone with a hat and pigtails, so–” Lex said this as she started shedding her jacket, pulling the sleeves off her arms and holding it out to Hannah.
When she put it on, it hung off her loosely and covered the backpack almost all the way, and when Lex reached up and pulled the hood over her head, it fell almost in front of her eyes.
“There. You’re hidden now, banana,” Lex said, reaching out and pushing one of Hannah’s braids back behind her shoulder. “Now we just have to find an exit to this stupid fucking mall.”
There’s an exit through Marshall’s down that hall. The path is clear .
“I know the way,” Hannah said. She clambered to her feet, wiping her palms off on her pants, and pulled Lex’s jacket tighter around herself. She could hear the uneven, limping sound of Lex carrying Ethan along with them, slow but moving steadily toward the exit. She led the way, securing the magic hat on her head, and as she did–
“S’okay, babe, I can…”
“Jesus, just let me carry you, you are covered in blood–”
You can make it out of here, Hannah.
–All the voices around her were ones she could trust.