56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

Author:Catherine Ryan Howard [Howard, Catherine Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Suspense, Crime, Mystery & Detective, General, Disaster, Horror, Psychological
ISBN: 9781982694678
Google: JY0jEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2021-08-17T22:53:25+00:00

In the moments before the fire alarm went off, Oliver was sitting on the couch in the living room, swiping absently through the pages of an e-book on his phone. He kept finding himself lost in the text, having to go back and reread the previous paragraph or page, only to find himself lost again a few lines later.

He couldn’t spare it any attention.

His mind was on other things.

And then the phone vibrated in his hand and the text message he’d been waiting for flashed on-screen—but it said the opposite of what he’d been hoping it would.

From: RICH

Don’t see another way for now. Too dangerous. Get out of there.

Oliver was blinking at the words when a deafening wail started up from all directions: the fire alarm.

Which meant—

Panicked, he dropped the phone onto the table and hurried into the hall. Through the open bedroom door, he could see that Ciara was already awake and getting out of bed, pulling on clothes and sticking her bare feet into her sneakers.

He didn’t move, didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think.

It was as if Rich’s words had had some kind of immobilizing effect on him, a verbal stun gun.

Don’t see another way for now. Too dangerous. Get out of there.

He was sure Rich was wrong.

But Oliver was equally sure that Rich could never be persuaded of that.

Ciara pushes past him and hurries into the living room. The touch of her body against his wakes him from his stupor, switching him into action mode, and he follows her. She seems frantic, wild-eyed, searching—

For her phone, it turns out, which is sitting on the coffee table not far from his.

Just as she bends to pick it up, the unthinkable happens: his phone lights up with Rich’s text message. He never actually opened it, so his phone is alerting him to it for a second time.

Oliver thinks his heart actually skips a beat.

But Ciara just picks up her phone and starts back toward him, toward the door. It seems like she didn’t even see it.

“Where are you going?” he shouts over the din of the alarm.

She points behind him. “Out!”

And then she pushes past him for a second time, out into the hallway.

This is his third fire alarm since he moved in, and his second middle-of-the-night one. The first time he did what he was supposed to do: he went outside. So did everyone else; the courtyard was soon filled with residents. He’d hung back in the shadows, head down, pretending to be enthralled by his phone. He’d avoided invitations to politely chitchat and ignored the opportunity to engage with any of his neighbors. He didn’t want to get to know any of them and he certainly didn’t want any of them to get to know him.

Forty-five minutes passed. It turned out to be a false alarm.

The second time it had gone off during the day, so he’d hesitated to leave. The door next to his own was a fire exit that opened onto the street; unless the fire was in his own apartment, he wasn’t in any danger.

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