Truth Comes Second

The Clean Up

Author's Note: Sorry for the short update! I'm squeezing one in before I have to go to biology. God I hate school

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Julie's POV:

I woke up to tears rolling down my cheeks. I looked over to my right to see an empty seat in the dark. Lina was no longer there. It was just a dream.

If Jimmy and Tommy were caught, I knew that it would be my fault. I didn't want to tell Cameron any of that, but I had to. I couldn't possibly lose Hunter. He was the only family I have left and I need to hold onto him.

I needed to get out of this bed and try to find them. Breathing had become easier and there was only a dull burn in my chest. I hadn't tried to move my leg though. I haven't left the bed since I woke up a few days ago.

I sat up in the bed and threw the blankets off of my lap. It must have been the middle of the night, because my room was dark and I could barely hear any nurses walking down the corridor. The moonlight came through the blinds and strips of dull light fell on my lap.

I slowly and carefully rolled up the end of the thin hospital gown I had on. A thick bandage was wrapped around my thigh. Kenny had told me that there was a surgery to fix the tendon in my leg. No one else said anything about it since.

Peeling back the tape holding the bandage together, I knew that I shouldn't be taking the bandage off. I couldn't stop myself. There was something possessing me to look at it. I tried to bend my knee slightly so that I could unravel the dressing. A sharp pain ran up to my hip and caused me to grit my teeth together.

I pull the dressing off little by little until my tender flesh was exposed. The flesh was held together by an extensive array of stitches. Pus and blood had stained the skin around the wound. I threw a hand over my mouth and lied back in the bed. Seeing Tommy's stab wound made it ache even more.

I wiped the tears away from my eyes. Jimmy hated it when I cried, but it seemed like that was all I could ever do any more

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Jimmy's POV

The bodies had been buried before the sun started to rise. I flopped down on my bed in the garage and stretched my arms up over my head. Tommy was still asleep.

I needed to clean the house. I needed to get all of the blood off of the walls and floor. But that could wait. My muscles ached and my eyes felt heavy. After a few hours of sleep, I'd be good enough to start working.

It felt like I had been sleeping for only a minute before I felt something hit me. I opened my eyes to see Tommy had thrown his pillow at me. He was sitting on the edge of his bed. I was surprised that he was able to move his leg enough to do that.

"What do you want?" I grumbled.

"It's the middle of the day," he told me. "How'd it go?"

"They're dead."

"And buried?"

"Tommy, this isn't my first time."

Tommy let out a chuckle and shook his head.

"When can we go inside?" he asked. "Spending the last few days smelling nothing but oil has caused me to lose enough brain cells."

"And you don't have any to spare," I said.

I sat up in my bed and stretched out my sore muscles. I hadn't noticed in the dark last night that my shirt was covered in blood. I pulled it up over my head and jumped out of bed.

"I haven't cleaned the house yet," I said.

"Do you really think that's going to bother me?" Tommy said wryly.

I rolled my eyes at him and threw his arm over my shoulder. I helped lift him up off of the bed and onto his feet. As we shuffled closer to the door, I realized that I wasn't dragging him as much as I needed to get him into the garage. He was putting a bit of his own weight on his leg.

Getting up the porch stairs was a bit more challenging, but we soon made our way into the house. I let Tommy go when I saw the couch. He lowered himself down onto it and pulled up his injured leg with him.

I saw the remote lying on the coffee table, so I picked it up and threw it at Tommy. He held it out in front of him and furrowed his brows together.

"What's this?" he asked me.

"A remote," I said. "Now turn the TV on."

"How do you do that?" he asked.

"Not a clue. But I have to go clean the bedrooms. Figure it out and find the news. We need to know what they're saying about us."

Tommy held the remote close to his face. He read every button carefully. After trying out a few buttons, and getting no results, he just clicked every one of them in a random order.

I went into the kitchen and opened up the cupboard doors under the sink. There was a bucket and a few cleaning products. I put the bucket into the sink and filled it with cold water. I read each of the labels until I found the bleach. I brought them over to Emily and Steve's room first.

I grabbed a handful of towels from the bathroom and dropped them on the floor beside the bucket. I rolled the sheets up into a ball and threw them on the floor. At least their room was easy to clean. I had to scrub the blood off of the side of the bedframe and the floor. Adam's room would take a lot longer.

I always hated cleaning. Dad always made cleaning a punishment for us. If Tommy and I got in a fight at the table, he'd make us spend the next day scrubbing the basement clean. He always made Mom do it before she died, but I would never send Julie down there to go do that.

"I got it!" I could hear Tommy shout. "I figured this stupid thing out."

Random laughter was coming from the TV until Tommy figured out how to change the channel. It was so loud I could hear every word they said from the bedroom.

They were talking about hunting down Tommy and me. After years of hunting, we were being hunted.