by Alyssa Cole
“We’re almost there,” Janeta huffed from behind him. Her hand brushed his arm. “I’m glad you figured things out, Cumberland.”
“It took me long enough,” he said.
“I’ve recently discovered that sometimes we figure things out when we most need to,” she said. There was a smile in her voice, despite the danger they were in. He needed to survive, just so he could feel that smile against his lips once more.
There was a house in the distance, and Maddie ran to it, hammering at the door. “Hurry up, Annabelle!”
The door opened and an older woman opened it, her gaze calm as she took in the scene. “Gonna be a tight fit.”
She turned and walked into the house and knelt close to a wall. Maddie did the same a few paces away from her, and they quickly began pulling up the floorboards, revealing a hollowed out space.
“Come on now,” Maddie said, beckoning. One by one, the escaped prisoners slipped into the shallow hole dug beneath the house and crouched, and Maddie followed them. Finally, only Janeta and Daniel remained, staring at the small space between Shelley and Jim, then looking at each other.
“We can flee into the woods,” Janeta suggested. Dread enveloped her at the alternative.
No. No, she wouldn’t leave him. Not after he’d come back to her.
“The woods gonna be crawling with slave catchers and Homeguard,” Maddie said in a low voice. “Get in here, now, girl!”
Janeta looked at Daniel, eyes wide and determination setting her brow.
“I’m no—”
Daniel leaned forward and caught her mouth in a kiss, cutting off her words and tasting her one more time. In case it was the final time. He cupped her face, tracing her jaw as her lips molded themselves against his.
He pulled away and looked at her.
“Get in, Sanchez.”
He managed a smile as he took the dynamite from her, and it wasn’t even fake. He’d just kissed a brave, bold, and beautiful woman, and she was looking at him like she wanted him to do it again.
“Don’t do anything foolish, Cumberland.”
Like fall in love?
“I’ll save that task for you, Sanchez.”
She slid into the last tight space of the hidey-hole and Daniel helped the woman named Annabelle replace the boards. He gave Janeta one last glance before placing the final board down. She was grinning up at him, but her smile faltered just before the board was settled into place. He hated what that image evoked, and the flicker of panic it woke in him.
“I got a place for you, too,” Annabelle said. “Don’t worry none.”
She led him to a part of the room cordoned off with a curtain and when she pulled it back Daniel reevaluated his new outlook on life. Perhaps he was a cursed man.
Before him was a dead man on a table and three wooden coffins stacked beside him. The woman was an undertaker.
“Help me move these now,” she said.
Numb dread trickled down the back of his neck as he helped her move first one coffin and then the other. She pried the lid off the bottom and largest—but not large enough—wooden box and gestured for him to get in.
He stepped into the box but couldn’t bring himself to sit. His skull prickled and sweat beaded along his hairline and under his arms. He glanced at the dead man on the table, whose eternal home he was likely breaking in for him.
Outside there was the sound of hoofbeats.
“Lie down!” Annabelle commanded. “If they find you, they gonna tear this place apart looking for the others.”
Daniel crouched, then lay down, though his mind howled in protest. His hands shook uncontrollably and he curled them into loose fists and pressed them into his thighs. He closed his eyes and fought the urge to jump up and run, everyone else’s safety be damned.
He groaned as she fit the lid back onto the box, but it was only when he heard the slide of the other coffin being placed on top of his that the panic kicked in.
No. No. You have to get out of here. Push the lid off. Run.
It was torture. Torture. Everything in his body screamed for him to move, to break free, to do anything he could to be out of the small, cramped space. His breath started coming quick and heavy as memories of his days of confinement bombarded him. Of his inability to move, to breathe, to be free.
The urge to put his palm against the lid of the coffin nearly overwhelmed him, but he resisted. If he placed one palm there, he would place the other, and then he would push in a frantic effort to be free, and all would be lost.
He balled his fists harder, digging his nails into his palms to distract himself. Sweat drenched his body, and he fought against the scream lodged in his throat.
He thought of Janeta, bravely jumping to her feet and pulling out her pistol. He thought of her flinging her knife with deadly precision. None of that stopped the overwhelming terror, but it tempered it. He silently whispered her name, a prayer to get him through this torment.
Something crawled against his face. The air in the coffin began to grow humid from his shallow breaths and his body heat.
You have to get out, his mind urged. You have to.
Something Elle had told him after she’d refused his request for marriage flashed through his panic. “You get something in your head and you’re like a dog with a bone, even if that bone tastes bad and maybe doesn’t even belong to you. What would happen if you used that stubbornness for something else?”
Daniel took as deep a breath as he could muster and focused on the very good reasons he had to calm himself as he slowly released it. Everything is fine. You can move your arms and legs. You can breathe. The box is not airtight.
Panic still gnawed at him like voracious insects, but he reclaimed the thoughts cycling in his mind bit by bit.
If you try to leave the box now, the Rebels win. If you stay calm, they lose. You cannot let them win. You are strong enough to do this. Janeta thinks so. Moses thinks so. Ellen thinks so.
He forced himself to focus on the words of self-support as much as he had focused on the voice that had told him he was worthless, and though he was still swamped in sweat and mired in panic, the situation was tolerable, and tolerable was all he needed to survive.
Finally, there was a heavy knock on the door, the force and speed of it transmitting in advance that the men wouldn’t be ignored and would, in fact, do as they wished. He heard Annabelle open the door, feigning surprise.
“Evening, gentlemen. What can I—oh!”
There were two sounds in succession: a hard smack, then Annabelle hitting the ground with a thud.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, angrily.
“Some darkies on the loose,” a man’s voice said. His words were punctuated by boot heels reverberating on the wooden floor. “They blowed up the general store and escaped from jail.”
Another man’s voice cut in. “It’s what those men was talking about. You give darkies an inch and they think they can do anything they want. We shoulda strung ’em up soon as they got marched to jail, men, woman, and child.”
Daniel was no longer thinking about how awful it felt to be trapped in a wooden box. He was focusing on the man’s words, and the sudden and unignorable fury they inflamed in him. Daniel was always angry, but this anger he held on to like a lifeline. He would not let these bastards find him cowering and afraid. His fists loosened and his mind focused, his calm driven by sheer spite.
“I don’t know nothing ’bout no escape,” Annabelle said in a voice steady but full of anger. “You busted up in my house, disrupting me laying a body to rest, and I don’t know nothing.”
“You think we don’t know how people sneak through here? Yeah, those men told us that, too,” the other voice said. “ ‘I thought this was a Rebel town,’ he said. ‘But you got darkies sneaking around making trouble, like they smarter than you.’”
Annabelle sighed. “Now, Hiram, I knowed you since you was a boy. You gonna listen to some strange man who come to town making trouble? You gonna
raise your hand to me and hurt me on account of them?”
“Yeah, I knowed you. Living out here alone doing who knows what devil work with your dead bodies. They say you get up all kind of hoodoo. That man said women like you even make poison to kill off white folk, and potions to make the slaves rebel.”
“Now, I don’t mess with none of that,” Annabelle said with a dark chuckle. “Neither of you would be here if I messed with any of that, believe me.”
“That a threat, darkie?” This was a new voice. It was more poised. More in control. “See? You let them talk to you like this, and that’s why Clark County men are seen as nothing but weak and spineless wastrels, no better than a Northman.”
Daniel grit his teeth. This was one of the primary strategies of the Sons, agitating and riling up poor white men whose tenuous pride was so easily wounded and whose intentions so quickly turned deadly.
“I wasn’t threatening nobody,” Annabelle said, but there was fear in her voice now that a total stranger had entered her home. “What I look like, threatening Hiram and Bill?”
Daniel’s agitation grew and grew, but there was nothing he could do. If he tried to free himself from the coffin, he’d make such a commotion that they’d hear him before he could make his way from below. If they killed him, they’d kill Annabelle, too, and search the house more.
Tears of frustration squeezed from his tightly shut eyes, and his fist unfurled to grip the dynamite he’d taken from Janeta.
“Go look behind the curtain,” the man said.
Daniel fumbled about, contorting himself so that his hand might reach the pocket in the inner lining of his jacket. Trying to move reminded him that he barely had any space to do so, but he fought his panic. He couldn’t ignore his fear, but he could beat it.
I’m stronger than fear.
“There’s coffins in here,” Hiram shouted.
His fingers closed around the box of matches he’d been trying to find, and he eased them out.
“Well, search them,” the commanding voice said, laced with annoyance.
The footsteps approached and the panic buzzing in Daniel’s brain went silent. All his attention was focused on the feel of the match in his hand and his attempt to light it against the box balanced on his stomach. He stopped breathing.
He scraped it against the sandpaper, once. Twice. The match flared and then died.
The coffin shook as they pried open the one above it.
Daniel sipped in a breath and attempted to strike a new match, but his hands were damp and the damned match wouldn’t strike; he tried until he was sure he’d rubbed away any part of it that would be useful, and then pulled out the third and final match.
The bottom of the coffin above him scraped against the lid of his.
He struck again. Once more, twice—dear Lord, this is my last chance—and then it flared triumphantly. Hope in the damned darkness, indeed. He lit the short fuse as the men pried at the lid. He had no idea how quickly or slowly it would burn, but he had no choice.
He didn’t want to die anymore—oddly after so many months of longing for it, he resented this conclusion to his time on earth—but he would do it for everyone in that hole beneath the house.
For Janeta, who had only just begun to find herself. She couldn’t die yet, and he wouldn’t let her.
The lid began to be pried up. This was it.
He sucked in a breath, eyes on the sparks coming off the dynamite’s wick.
As soon as it lifted the tiniest bit, Daniel sprang forward. He was a big man, something that had been touted as a benefit as he stood on the auction block, and he used his size and the element of surprise, pushing up hard.
He gripped the lid of the coffin as the men stumbled away in shock. He took the briefest second to relish the look of shock on their face—to them, Daniel was the dead come back to life. They weren’t entirely wrong.
He held tightly to the coffin lid, the dynamite held against it with his right palm, and used it to push the men back, back out of the room. He didn’t look at their faces any longer, only seeing pale pink blurs in his single-minded focus. He pushed them into the other man, another pale blur above a suit of black, pushed them out the door and into the night, the hiss of the dynamite’s fuse driving him forward.
Everyone in the hole was in danger. If he failed, they would all die. Or worse, be sold back into slavery or punished for starting an insurrection. Daniel could not allow this.
He threw all his weight into the wood, knocking the men to the ground outside the door.
He still held the dynamite.
The wick burned low, but not low enough. Or was it? Daniel had no idea when it would go off.
The men were beginning to stand, and one of them was reaching for his gun.
Daniel lobbed the dynamite forward, and it tumbled end over end, leaving a trail of sparks in the dark night. Then the small dots of beauty expanded to a flash of light and heat and sound. Daniel flew backward, backward, backward, with no thought on his mind, but the heat on his lips making him think of Janeta.
CHAPTER 26
Everyone in the hidey-hole flinched as the shock of Annabelle hitting the floor reverberated through the boards brushing their heads.
Janeta had already reached for her guns as the men harassed Annabelle, as they spoke to her with contempt to make themselves feel big.
Rage simmered in her as she listened to them try to make Annabelle do as they wished, whining and complaining about what was owed to them as they tried to take power from others. The contempt in their tones heeled like trained dogs when the third man showed up, but they lost none of their angry entitlement.
Janeta grit her teeth. That her and her friends should be hiding like rats. That Annabelle should be hit like she was nothing to nobody. How could anyone think that this was the proper order of the world? Janeta had lamented how easily she swallowed lies to believe that her life had been deserved, but she wasn’t the only one.
Men like this roamed America, seeking to claim every part of this land for themselves like the plague of locusts the padre in church had talked about. She was sure these men sat at mass every Sunday and heard the same readings, but did they realize they were the harbingers of the end of all that was good? Were they oblivious, or did they know, and relish in that designation?
“There’s coffins in here!” one of the men called out.
“Well, search them,” their leader said.
Fear pushed Janeta’s rage to the backburner.
She couldn’t imagine what state Daniel was in, enclosed in a coffin. But those men were going to find him. She gripped her guns, the weapons that had been given to her mother in case of slave rebellion. Perhaps Mami would be proud that that was exactly what they were being used for—rebellion. Janeta would never again smile and make herself small and grateful for being treated like a human, and she wouldn’t allow these men to touch Daniel.
She shifted as if to stand, but Maddie grabbed her arm hard, then squeezed in warning. Janeta tried to tug away and Maddie’s grip tightened. She knew what it meant.
You cannot go to him without risking all of us.
Janeta sat still, body tensed and tears stinging her eyes, listening to the drag of wood and the thump as first one coffin and then another was placed on the floor. She waited to hear the man she cared for executed. There was no other possibility—it was three to one, and Daniel could not lurk in the shadows and strike as he had with the soldiers who’d taken their food. Even then, his victory had been one of ingenuity and not brute strength.
Tears slipped down her cheeks and Janeta shook her head, unwilling to believe harm could come to him. Daniel had survived so much. He would survive this, too.
Then there were shouts, and not from Daniel. A heavy tread thundered overhead, pushing forward behind stuttering, shuffling steps that had to be the other men. The sounds were moving toward the front door.
Daniel was fighting back, and judging from the tumult, he was winning. There
was a brief pause, and silence. Had Daniel won that easily?
Her heart leapt—and then the house leapt, shuddering as a blast shook it.
No, no, no.
Maddie’s grip loosened on her as they were all jostled and something slammed to the boards above them. Ears still ringing Janeta crouched with her hands against the boards above her, pushing and pushing to no avail.
She had to get to Daniel.
“Something’s fallen over the boards. Help me,” she begged.
“All right,” Moses’s voice floated to her, and tears sprang to her eyes.
“Thank you, sweet boy. All of us need to do this.”
The others shifted around her, and she could sense their blooming panic as the smell of smoke drifted faintly through the cracks in the floor. What if the roof had come down on them? What if they couldn’t escape?
“Everybody, let’s push on the count of three,” Maddie said calmly, taking the situation in hand. “Dig your heels in and give it all you got. One. Two. Three!”
Janeta strained, her feet digging into the cold clay ground. They all pushed up, as if lifting their hands in prayer, and though it had been difficult for Janeta alone, with their combined forces the boards moved as the blockage rolled away with a thud. They pushed aside a couple of the boards completely, debris raining down on them, and Janeta coughed as she peered up into the once-tidy room.
Smoke hung in the air, and splinters of wood. And when she turned her head, she saw what had weighed down the door—Daniel’s body. His face and scalp were burned, and from this angle she couldn’t see if he was breathing, but he was much too still.
“Daniel? Daniel!”
He didn’t move. Janeta placed her guns down and braced a hand on the board in front of her, trying to hoist herself out.
“Daniel!”
The pressure on her arms eased, and she realized that the others were lifting her from below, an unasked for kindness, like so many she had received since she’d set out on this journey. She stowed that memory away—she couldn’t take it for granted even though horror prickled her scalp and was beginning to numb her senses.