by Skylar Finn
He was still for a moment, listening. A bird whistled in the trees. He whistled back. “That will be the signal,” he said. “That whistle. Try it.”
I formed my lips into an O. I had always been a terrible whistler. At first, my mouth was too dry and I barely emitted a breathy tweet. I was nervous and stressed out. My head hurt less after the aspirin-and-acetaminophen cocktail Peterman had served me, but I was under less than ideal conditions to learn how to whistle.
“Try again,” Ethan urged me. I took a deep breath and thought of Grace. I blew out the same three notes as the bird, and it tweeted back at me through the trees.
“Whistle like that, three times in a row, if you see that guy going into the house,” said Ethan. “You’re going to have to get a little bit closer, too.”
He led me through the trees until we were about twenty feet from the back of the house. There was no guard stationed there and I wondered uneasily if it was, as Ethan said, a trap. I concealed myself as best I could behind a low shrub.
“I’ll be back,” Ethan promised in a whisper so soft I barely heard him and before I could say anything or even react, he was gone.
The moments I spent waiting in the bush were some of the longest of my life. All I could picture was what might be happening inside of the house: to Ethan, to Grace. I imagined how empty my life would be without them.
The back door creaked open. I watched it, paralyzed. I considered signaling Ethan, but I had no idea where he was and I didn’t want him to be seen getting back to the woods.
It was Dexter. He walked to the edge of the porch and spat over the side. The door creaked open a second time and Clarice came out. I was pleased to see that her shoulder was heavily bandaged and her arm was in a sling.
“I would love to go back and barbeque those people,” Dexter said when he was finished expectorating over the side of the porch. “Douse that place in gasoline and just light. Them. Up.”
“What about their stuff?” asked Clarice.
“Well, therein lies the paradox, don’t it, darlin’? We need their stuff. We got fifteen people to feed and they must be sitting on quite a little stockpile out there for them to defend it the way they did. It’s probably all in that house and I can’t go burning it down just yet. Guy like that probably has it hidden in a secret passageway only he knows how to get to. Plus, that might make a nice little side spot for our brood, once it’s all said and done. It’s pretty well-fortified, unlike those other places.” He laughed, a loud braying laugh like a donkey. I felt a flare of anger as I thought about the Davidsons.
Fifteen people? It was possible that some of them were somehow incapacitated and unable to fight, or maybe Dexter just hadn’t thought he’d need all of them for the coup against the ranch. The doctor didn’t look like the fighting type and had probably just come along in case someone got injured. Buddy was definitely down for the count. Clarice didn’t look like she was in the best of shape herself, but that still left twelve people. That was four of them for each of us. The odds were definitively not in our favor.
“What do you want me to do with the girl?” asked Clarice. My entire body tensed.
“Keep her occupied,” he said absently. “We don’t hurt kids. If they know what’s good for them--for her--they’ll give us everything they got. We’ll decide what to do with them then.”
“You’re not thinking of keeping them, are you?” Clarice sounded incredulous. “They tried to kill us! We already got too many people as it is.”
“We did try to kill them first, darlin’. And it never hurts to have some extra fighters,” he said thoughtfully. “That guy is gonna have to go, of course, but if we keep the girl alive, the woman will fall in line in order to protect her. And she’s strong. She beat you, didn’t she?”
“It was a lucky shot.” Clarice sounded bitter. “They got that other guy, too. And he knows how to shoot.”
“They probably taught him that,” said Dexter dismissively. “I know his type: college-educated, forty-five years of school, fifty on the job. I’d put money on him knowing something real useful. I can practically smell it. How do you think I found Doc? We get rid of the other guy, keep the leftover two locked up for a while till they fall in line, and we got a new place, twice the supplies, and extra workers. Seems like a done deal to me.”
“What makes you think they’re going to go quietly?” asked Clarice.
“They won’t,” said Dexter simply. “We’re just gonna have to make them.”
The screen door creaked a third time as they disappeared inside. I nearly jumped out of my skin when Ethan re-appeared next to me without making a sound. He put his finger to his lips, then slowly backed away the way we came. He was silent until we reached the Jeep and climbed inside.
“They’re everywhere,” he said grimly. “They’re crawling around every room of that house like cockroaches. No families or children, just a bunch of hardened criminals. A few injuries--the man that I shot, somebody who got pretty torn up falling into the stake pit, and that woman, Clarice. But the others seem both fully armed and operational.”
“You went inside?” I stared at him as he backed out of the woods and pulled back onto the narrow road. “How?”
“They’re careless,” he said. “It’s not an act. The basement window was unlocked. The staircase was right next to the downstairs hallway, where the basement stairs come out. Most of them are lounging around the living room, getting drunk. The others were asleep upstairs, on the second floor. They never heard me.”
I thought of how quiet he was moving through the woods. I imagined him slipping undetected through the rooms of the house, like a ghost.
“Did you find Grace?” I asked. I knew she was okay; there was no point in them lying when they had no idea I was hiding nearby, listening. But it didn’t make me any less afraid.
“There’s another staircase leading to the third floor attic room that’s locked. I’m sure that’s where they have her.”
“Do you think she’s okay?”
“I could hear her.” He smiled, remembering. “She was singing.” Grace often absently sang to herself when she was especially immersed in a project she was working on. “I guess they gave her something to amuse herself. But it was so hard not to just break the door down, take her, and kill everyone on my way out.” He stared out the window, watching the road go by. “We never would have made it. One of them came upstairs as soon as I reached the staircase door and I had to go out the window. Ran across the roof and scaled the drainpipe.”
I tried to imagine the Ethan I’d always known, the Ethan who barbequed in the summer and fished in the fall, diving out of a window and scaling a drainpipe. I found that it was hard to picture. That even after everything, I still had a hard time recognizing the dual dichotomies he’d carried with him all these years. What was it like, to be two people?
“What’s it like?” I asked him. We were a few miles from town and I wanted to say anything I could to distract us from the thought of Grace, locked in that room and waiting for us to come.
“What is what like?” He glanced at me curiously before turning back to the road.
“Being two people,” I said.
One of the things that I liked best about Ethan was that I rarely had to clarify anything for him. He always seemed to know just what I meant. He mulled the question over.
“I never really thought about it,” he said at last. “It’s always just been a part of me. Like blinking, or breathing. This is the first time I ever really had to use it. I mean, since I left.”
“What was it like there?” It was the one aspect of his life we never talked about. One that I hadn’t understood the weight of, before now.
“Hard. Dangerous. Exciting.” He was silent for a moment. “Even though it was all I knew, I still had the sense that something wasn’t right. That there was something deeply abnormal about it.”
“When did you decide to run away?”
“It was after one of our reconnai
ssance missions. In hindsight, all we were really doing was stealing. Not so different from what Dexter and his people are doing. I was with two guys, hitting one of the vacation homes, but it was getting a little too close to tourist season. Guy came in with his wife, or maybe she was his girlfriend. Possibly his fiancee; I don’t know. I used to think about it all the time, wondering: who they were to one another, and what we had taken away.
“The kids I was with, they got startled. And they were just kids, like me. Teenagers. One of them shot the guy. I can still remember the sound of her screaming. And the bottle of wine smashed on the floor. I couldn’t tell what was wine and what was his blood. I ran. I ran right back home and didn’t tell anyone what I saw. I went straight to my room and got the bag I already had packed there. I’d been thinking about leaving for a while, you see. I left that night and never looked back.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, looking over at him. He kept his eyes trained on the road. “You don’t even know if the guy died. Maybe she got help. Maybe he ended up being okay.”
“Maybe,” he said without taking his eyes from the road. “Or maybe he died. Maybe they shot her, too. I don’t know. Sometimes, it’s the not knowing that’s the hardest part.”
He pulled up behind the feed store and parked behind the dumpster. “Are you okay with splitting up?” he asked.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “But it will go faster.”
“I agree,” he said. “I want us to get in and out of here as quickly as possible. See if you can get into the general store and maybe the hardware store. If you can’t, don’t worry about it. Just get back here. If you can, check under the counters, see if somebody had a gun stashed back there. Remember the signal.”
We got out. He approached the back of the store, picked up a nearby trashcan, and threw it through the back window, shattering it. He disappeared through the broken window without a backwards glance.
I walked along the back of the feed store, adjacent to the back of the strip that held the hardware store, the general store, and the drug store. I thought of what I had just seen him do and what he had just told me. Not only was the world different now, in the most terrible of ways, but we were also different people in it. It was like going to bed one night normal and then waking up inside of a nightmare.
I tried hard not to look at the back of Davidson’s Drugs when I passed. It was one more thing I couldn’t stand to think about. But I looked over automatically as I walked by, like a puppet with my head on a string. It was impossible not to.
The glass in the back door was still broken, and now it stood wide open. I remembered how they’d said they were coming back for everything else in the store. I thought of Pat inside with the shroud I had placed over his face. All my anger and fear washed over me in a never-ending wave.
Without realizing it, I’d approached the back of the store. I looked down to see that I was standing in a circle of crushed glass. I shook myself. I needed to get to the general store, the hardware store, check for guns, and get back to the feed store. If I got distracted, I’d be putting myself in danger. Ethan would worry. He might end up having to save me, and I might get both myself and him injured--or worse--in the process.
I heard a sound from within the store, distantly down the hallway that led from the back door. The thought of any of them coming back, yet again, to ransack the livelihood of the people they’d killed was too much for me. If I had been thinking of anything, it might have been of revenge: for the Davidsons, for Grace.
But I wasn’t thinking: not as I drew my gun, not as I crunched through the glass, over the threshold, and into the store.
18
The corridor was dark, what little existing illumination provided by the display windows at the front of the store. Glass crunched beneath my feet as I made my way slowly down the hall, my gun drawn. When I reached the end, I thought I saw a brief flash of motion: a blurred shape, running across the edge of my vision. I ducked behind a display of Get Well cards.
I peered around the edge of the aisle. I saw and heard nothing. I inched forward slowly, my eyes adjusting to the darkness, when I felt cold metal press against my skull and froze.
“Drop it,” said a young man’s voice behind me. “Don’t make any sudden moves, or I’ll shoot.” There was something very familiar about the voice. I set my weapon down and slowly turned.
“Tom?” I asked incredulously.
“Who is that?” Tom’s voice sounded suspicious and afraid. “How do you know me?”
I searched my memory. Peterman came out of the Davidsons’ house and told me not to go in. He said there was nothing he could do. He said that if I had gone there earlier, it wouldn’t have changed anything. He never said there were two bodies in the house and I hadn’t asked.
“It’s me,” I said, slowly turning the rest of the way around. “Charlie.”
Tom lowered the crowbar in his hands, looking astonished. “Charlie? What are you doing here?”
“Ethan and I made it out of the city with Grace and went straight to the ranch,” I said, getting carefully to my feet so as not to startle him. “We have someone else with us, a doctor. I came here first thing to get supplies and I saw them, when your dad…” I stopped, then continued haltingly, “I’m so sorry. There was nothing I could do. He saw me before they did and told me to hide. He saved me.”
Tom nodded. “Were you the one who covered his face?” he asked solemnly.
“Yes,” I said. “I would have taken him out of this place, to you and your mom, but I was alone and they said they were coming back.”
“Thank you,” said Tom. “For covering him. I wondered about that. I knew it wasn’t them, but I didn’t really give it too much thought. I couldn’t. I was devastated. I still am.”
“How did you get away?” I asked. “I went by your house with the doctor, Charles Peterman, and he told me not to go in. I thought something happened to you and Mary both.”
“They came in while we were sleeping,” he said, his voice bitter. “Dad got up early to come down here and get what he could, then lock up the place so nobody would rob us. They would have killed us both in our beds, I’m sure, but I wasn’t in my bed. I have problems sleeping and when it gets bad, I go up to the hayloft. I used to camp out there when I was a kid, and I’ve always been able to fall asleep up there for some reason. I heard them when they came in to take the horses. I ran to the house, but it was too late.” His voice broke with despair. I was reminded of Ethan, when he realized Grace was missing.
I realized then that it wasn’t enough to get Grace back. I thought of all the harm and destruction these people had caused in such a short amount of time, and I knew we had to stop them. Permanently.
“I’m so sorry, Tom,” I said, allowing for a moment of silence out of respect for Mary and Pat before adding, “They took Grace.”
“What?” Tom looked horrified. “They kidnapped her?”
“They came to the house and broke the door down,” I said. “They must have been planning it since we arrived. They shot up our place and took her in the middle of it. Ethan and I found them today, and he knows where they’re keeping her, but we couldn’t get to her and get her out of the house safely with all of them there.”
“You know where they’re at?” The rage radiating from him was palpable. “Can you show me?”
“We can’t just go rushing in there without a plan,” I said, holding up my hands. “We have to think of Grace.”
“Of course.” He was quiet for a moment, thinking. “It’s just that I know there’s no law now. There will never be any repercussions for their actions unless they’re carried out by me.”
“There’s a lot of them,” I said. “Even more than we initially thought. Fifteen, by our last count.”
“Fifteen?” In the dim light of the store, I could see the wheels of his brain turning. “How can we overtake that many of them without it becoming a suicide mission? If it was just me, I wouldn’t care. I
just want justice for my parents, and I’m alone in the world now. But you and Ethan have each other and Grace to think about.”
“You’re not alone,” I said firmly. “You have us. And we’re going to get in there somehow, together. Peterman--the doctor--he thinks we should go to the militia compound and ask for help. Ethan thinks they’ll shoot us on sight.”
“I know them,” said Tom, blinking. “I don’t think they would shoot us. Not right away, at least.”
“You know them?” I asked, startled. “But how?”
“I used to make deliveries there,” he said. “They don’t like to come into town. At least not any more than necessary. They know who I am. They probably wouldn’t shoot me...probably.”
“Will you come with us?” I asked. “To talk to them?”
“I’m on board for anything that leads to taking out the people who killed my parents,” said Tom firmly.
I was so intent on our conversation, I didn’t hear anything before the hand squeezed my shoulder from behind. I screamed and jumped, reaching for my gun. Tom raised his crowbar as we turned to see Ethan, silent as usual.
“Tom?” Ethan sounded astonished. “I thought you were dead!”
“That seems to be the prevailing sentiment,” he said wryly.
Ethan turned to me. “Peterman said that he went inside when you went to the Davidsons. I asked if there was anyone left alive, and he said no. I didn’t even think.” He shook his head. “I got worried and came to check on you. I got everything we needed from the feed store.”
“Ethan,” I said urgently, “Tom knows the guys at the compound.”
“You do?” Ethan turned to him with interest. “How well do you know them?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘knows,’ exactly,” hedged Tom. “That might be a little presumptuous given our actual relationship. They know my face and my name, and we always had what I guess you might call a positive dynamic with them. We gave them what they wanted without asking any questions and they always paid us on time.”