David didn't lose consciousness, but the flash of light blinded him momentarily. There was a residue of the pain radiating down his arms and legs as he struggled to get to his knees. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs as his vision began to return to him. He looked around quickly and saw no one. His shotgun lay a couple of feet away from him and he clumsily crawled over to it, picking it up and scrambling back around the corner.
"What the fuck was that?" David said aloud, under his breath.
It took a full sixty seconds for David to muster his courage to look around the corner again. The voices had gone silent and David again saw nothing out of the ordinary in the kitchen. He winced, half expecting the white light and pain again, but nothing happened. He crawled slowly to the kitchen counter and pulled himself to his feet. His hands and feet still tingled with the final remnants of the pain and David felt as though he had been run over by a truck.
Leaning heavily on the counter, he made his way through the kitchen. On the far end of the kitchen was a laundry room, which led to the garage. He was no longer capable of crouching or bursting into rooms, so he just slowly turned the corner into the laundry room. He looked out of the window into the back yard and saw nothing unusual. He opened the door to the garage and saw nothing out of place.
The adrenaline was gone and with it went all David's courage and desire for confrontation. David wasn't sure what had happened and for the moment he didn't care. He just wanted to rest and recover.
He dragged himself back to the living room and collapsed on the couch. There were a number of questions begging to be asked, but David had no energy to think it all through. Instead, he slept.
David wasn't entirely sure how long he was unconscious. The generators ran out of gas while he was sleeping and all of his appliances shut off. He woke up hungry and sore all over. He scrounged a box of pop tarts from the pantry and opened a luke-warm soda from the refrigerator. After getting the generators restarted and making sure that his frozen meat hadn't gone bad, David sat at his kitchen table to try and sort through what had happened.
He could still see the flash of light when he closed his eyes and the aching in his extremeties was a constant reminder of the pain that accompanied the flash. Every thought and every memory raised a dozen questions and David had trouble focusing on any single question. He decided that he needed to compartmentalize the issue, so first he considered the light.
He decided that it had to be some kind of weapon. It stunned him and caused him pain and seemed to be a reaction to David's actions with the shotgun. But who could be attacking him and why? It had to be the voices - hadn't they said something about hurting him? The questions clouded his mind again and he closed his eyes to clear his head.
When he opened his eyes again his first thought was "It's beyond my understanding." He didn't know where the thought came from, but it felt right. It was a comforting thought, absolving him of the strain of trying to figure out the problem. There was another problem, though, that he had to solve: what would he do if the voices came back?
David took a drink of the warm soda and the stale carbonation burned the back of his throat as he considered each of his encounters with the voices. He realized that the times he'd gotten in trouble were the times that he chased and called out to the voices. He was safest when he ignored them. So David decided that no matter how lonely he became or how tempting it would be to try and locate the source of the voices, he would never again acknowledge them.
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