Bandages, and other white cloth.

     He started driving faster after that. He checked his phone once, and almost took out a lamp post. I clenched my fist and opened it, over and over again. The bandages pulled against my wrist, shooting a pain up my forearm. I kept it up, squeezing, aching, releasing, relaxing squeezing again. I was trying to make myself immune to it. trying to shake off pain. It wasn't working, but I kept trying anyway, trying to make it hurt enough to matter. It didn't.
     Silas was flying down the freeway now, bobbing in and out of traffic. He drives like an asshole, but I wasn't going to tell him at this junction. We were long past Chicago, on the 90, past sleepy hollow and on the way to Hampshire  I realized what he was doing, he was rushing for the next house on the list, the next family who might still be alive. The trip should have been an hour or so, according to Google maps, but Silas did it in about half that. We found ourselves swerving through suburbs, track housing, whatever you want to call it. We turned onto Schmidt, and were about to turn onto barn owl, the home where they lived, but we were stopped by the two police cars and an ambulance sitting on the culdesac. Silas hit the brakes, cussed me out, and told me how to behave, before parking the car in a neighbor's driveway.
     We got out of the car, acting completely bewildered. Silas approached the cops, who were filling out their paperwork, and I stood by the car, acting nervous, which was easy for me. Apparently, we'd been camping for a week, and didn't know anything about anything. He spoke with them for awhile, lots of disbelief on his face, and fear. The medical examiner walked out through the front door of the house, pulling a gurney behind him, covered in a white cloth. When that happened, Silas feigned squeamishness, and I turned away from the whole scene. Silas walked back to the car shortly after that, told me to get in.
     We left and we went to some little diner, where Silas filled me in. Apparently, there was one victim, a woman, in her thirties. She lived alone in the house, which seemed crazy, considering how big it was. She drowned herself in the pool, according to the M.E. After we ate, I payed the check and asked Silas whet the plan was. He sighed and sat quietly for awhile, before admitting with heavy resignation, that we needed to regroup. So we headed back to the bank.

Silas, Honestly.

     We climbed back into the car, and hit the road again, hoping to put some distance between us and the police force that was hunting for us. My wrist hurt like a sonnofabitch, but I didn't make a sound about it. Silas didn't make a sound about anything. We drove in silence for a couple of hours. I was embarrassed about hurting myself, and Silas was unreadable for a very long time, until we hit a large bump, or, I guess it was a pothole, I don't know. What I do know is that my wrist bounced, hit the arm rest, and I yelped. Yelped is a girly word for it, but not an inaccurate one. That noise, whatever you call it, set Silas off. I'll try my best to recount what he said:
     "What, did you hurt your wrist? Jesus, you're amazing. Why the hell are you even doing this? You can't handle a fucking broken wrist, but you expect yourself to hold up against everything out here? Unbelievable."
     We got silent again for a few minutes. Silas was obviously pissed at me, and I couldn't argue. I had taken all sorts of hits and bruises and shit, but at the end of the day, I knew he was twice the badass I was. You can just tell about some guys, y'know? He stared down the road for awhile longer, clearly mulling things over in his head. I could see the cloud forming over his head, the anger building in his eyes. I knew I was in for it.
     "Your bitch ass couldn't even handle a fucking hangover. A goddamn hangover. Have you even thought about that? If your pansy ass had grown up, made like a man and got going that day, three people could still be alive. That's on you. You'd better realize that. Every time you are a weak-ass little girl, every time you take too long to man up, you put people in danger now. Bandage the damn wrist, because I'm done making concessions for you. Now we're doing things my way." 
     I should have argued, I should have stuck up for myself, but I knew he was right. Those people died because I wasn't there to help them. I bandaged my wrist up way too tight, trying to make the pain on the outside match the pain on the inside. It didn't work.
And now I knew who Silas was.

The Cops

     The cops began to shout, like they always do things like " we have you surrounded" and "step outside quietly!" We decided instead, to find a back way out. When we made it to the back door, we peered out of the window in the door and discovered that the cops were't lying, they did have us surrounded. Silas gestured to me and I followed him toward the stairs. He was unshaken by the cops everywhere, all business. We dashed up the stairs, walking along the hallway and checked through each room, looking for our out. We found it at the end of the hallway, the third bedroom in the house. We didn't really pay attention to it before, and even while we were escaping, we didn't notice it, but looking back, it should have sent up about a million red flags.
     The room was painted yellow, with sports pennants and star wars posters on the walls. the whole place was coated in dust and cobwebs, and we ran through with barely a glance, as we headed for the window. the bedroom had a roof right under it we hopped out of the window and ran down the roof toward the neighbor's yard. We jumped and rolled onto their back lawn, I twisted my wrist on the landing, but Silas immediately got running again. we hopped the fence, Silas with style, me with a nice groan, as i tried to fling my wrist over with me. It took us half an hour to lose the cops on our tail, and an hour later, we stole a tow truck. We threw on uniforms, and pretended to have been called by the cops to pick up our own car. It was risky, but we pulled the car away, dropped the tow truck off at a Hardee's and split.

The First Family

     After shaking off Friday's hangover, we finally got on our way to the first family's home. It was just outside of Chicago  There were a bunch of other names in Chicago, but they all came with obituaries. We were very tense on the way over to the house, neither of us sure what we were going to learn, who was behind all of this mess, or what it was all about.
     The house was tiny, a little suburban home in the back of a culdesac. The house shared a floor plan with more or less half of the neighborhood. The car was in the driveway, but none of the lights were on inside. We didn't know how to approach the matter. I had my pistol in my pocket, and Silas had a small gun with him as well. We stood awkwardly outside the door as I rang the doorbell. We waited for a long while before Silas knocked, impatiently.

We waited.

Then we waited some more.

Then Silas decided to try the doorknob, and the door swung wide open.

Three people lay on the living room floor. I will never forget their faces. A mother, thin, beautiful, vacant in the eyes. Her husband, laying across her legs, tears dried on his cheeks. Their daughter, maybe eight years old, thrown on her back, folded over the coffee table. All three of them had narrow bruises across their throats, where someone had strangled them with a wire.

Vomit welled up in my throat, and I choked it back down, as Silas drew his pistol, and began to search the house. I followed after him, room by room, looking for anything, or anyone, but the house was empty. We decided there was nothing for us to do but leave.
I should say, I decided that. Silas was silent. I could see that rage building in him again, and I knew we wouldn't be talking for another day. I placed my hand on the front door to leave, when the spotlight hit the window, and we heard the police shout out at us.

A Toast and a Plan

     We mourned the dead the next night, over cheap beer. It was almost more depressing than just reading the list, that the only way we could show our support was to sit in a dim old bank sipping canned piss, and plastic bottle tequila. We decided that night, not to linger on the dead, but to protect the ones who were still alive. We didn't understand what was happening to these people, or why, but we knew that if we could find one family still alive, they might be able to help us understand, and stop whatever was happening.
     A few of the hackers volunteered to help us find the people on the list who were still alive, and to arrange a route between their homes. The cheap beer and tequila must have loosened me up, because I agreed to go without much hesitation. The rest of the guys were up for hours after I fell asleep, formulating plans. When I woke up on Friday morning, they had already found the nearest family. Silas seemed ready to go, but I was so hungover that I couldn't get focused enough to go. Silas didn't like it, but he waited for me anyway.
     Silas spent the rest of the day working with some of the hackers on various ideas to get things together. He suggested creating a "Spider" to search repeatedly for all of the names on the list, and let us all know if anything changed. I don't really understand it, but they seemed to like the idea. They jumped on it, and one of the younger kids jumped right on it. I spent the day with Liza, preparing for Saturday, packing up my gear again, and grabbing food supplies, since we weren't expecting to come back to the collective. The idea was that we'd move from one home to the next, learning what we could, and offering whatever protection we could, before moving to the next home. We weren't prepared for what was going to happen.

The list

     The attic was miserable and hot, but despite the creaky mattresses and dusty sheets, we managed to find some sleep. The next morning, we woke early and moved downstairs into the hive of activity that rustled under us. They assigned us computers, and offered us food. We were treated very well, I think because they knew that if it came to it, we would have to protect them. There seemed to be a lot of respect coming our way, it was nice, but a bit tiresome. People always ready to help, or just get in our way.
     We spent the better part of a week poring over the lists, scanning line by line, looking for connections anywhere. It was a long list. It wasn't until Saturday that we found our own names on the list. We were on a page labeled "Active Threats" along with a few other names, most of whom were also tagged as deceased. Silas took it very seriously. There were only about twelve names on the sheet, and he seemed to know a lot of the names. We didn't talk much after that, he just got angry and settled in front of a tv, cleaning his rifle. Silas has a very cold, steely anger, the silent kind of rage that is even more terrifying than a man yelling at full steam. I was glad he was angry at whoever had created the list, and not at me. Although, I think I reminded him of the people he had lost, which made things tense for the rest of the weekend. He didn't speak to anyone until Monday morning, when he walked down the stairs, humming a quiet tune, as if he had never been angry to begin with.
     You could see a difference though, in his attitude. He was more diligent in his list sifting, more determined to find the connection. There was a new passion in his hunt, but it seemed more and more that there was no connection between these people. Finally, on Wednesday, Silas made the connection. He had decided to try more rudimentary sorting techniques, and sorted the list alphabetically. Suddenly, almost every person on the list had at least one pairing. The people in the list shared last names. They were all families; mothers, fathers, children. We started to look them up as families, always with the same results: newspaper articles with headlines like: " Family of Four Dead in Catastrophic Fire" or "Insane Mother Drowns Two Daughters". Almost all of them were dead, but none of them in identical circumstances. Thousands of people dead, with no connections between the deaths, just a laundry list of obituaries. I cried myself to sleep that night.