Jorja slowly slid out of the passenger side of the truck and shut the door. The middle-aged driver looked at her with concern as she went around the front.
“Are you sure you’re gonna be all right, kiddo?”
“Yeah...I think I’ll be fine,” Jorja replied quietly. She wore the driver’s oversized, red-striped work shirt and men’s pants far too large to have any practical use; she had to hold it up. It was a far cry from the simple but elegant blue dress she wore to the Republican fundraiser dinner party, and she no longer had the diamond necklace and black shoes. She looked very downtrodden, dirt on her hair and skin from tripping in the forest, where she ran into for her life. She wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she remembered what she saw happened.
The truck driver waited for a minute while Jorja made her way up to the lofty estate before driving away. She scarcely had to ring the doorbell when a young man answered the door. He had clearly seen her walking up and had a worried look about him.
“Sarah! You look terrible.”
“You should have seen what happened at the party, Michael…,” she answered, but Michael led her inside before she could explain what horror she saw.
“You hardly need to! It’s all over the news!” He waved at the direction of the television as he closed the door. Jorja wandered over to the sofa as she kept watching the report, but could hardly take it all in; the FBI had ruled it a terrorist attack, with the Van der Burg residence in ruins and the dead littering inside and outside the mansion. The survivors had mostly fled, answering questions about what they saw. Presidential candidate John McCain, an injured vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had evacuated long ahead of everyone else; the Secret Service had led any VIPs out an alternative exit swiftly. Reports were also talking about how particular the deaths of the man Jorja knew as the Hunter and the patriarch of the family were. The patriarch was riddled with many bullets, but strangely there was no blood, so to speak; instead, there was a clear liquid surrounding him where he lay. Meanwhile, the Hunter’s body was strangely hot to the touch.
Jorja still couldn’t shake the things she had seen when the patriarch’s son escorted her and the rest of the women from the limousine upstairs. She still wasn’t sure what was in the blood of the son, if it was blood at all, but she was sure she wasn’t hallucinating when she saw his head turn into that of a wasp. None of the other women seemed to notice or care as they were being bound and beaten.
Jorja didn’t add to her explanation when Michael pressed her for more details.
“I think you should talk to the authorities!” He said with finality.
“Maybe tomorrow I’ll do that. I just…want to rest,” Jorja said as she leaned back into the wall.
“Okay…but first, you should probably take a shower and relax.” Michael led her to the bathroom with his hand on the small of her back, even though she already knew where it was.