Erased

by Jennifer Rush

  And even if it was a smaller, private airport, I’d have nowhere to hide when I ran.

  Jumping from the vehicle was my best option.

  We drove through several more intersections, hitting all the green lights, and then turned right onto Brennon Street.

  The next light was red. We squeaked to a stop.

  I tensed every muscle in my body as I anticipated making my move.

  The driver pressed a finger to the device in his ear.

  I relaxed enough to focus on his words.

  “Where?” he said quietly. Then, “Copy.”

  He whipped the wheel around, performing a U-turn in the middle of the street.

  “What is it?” Will asked, on edge.

  “They’re here.”

  “Where?”

  “One of them was just spotted two blocks over.”

  Will cursed and ran his hand through his hair. “Which one?”

  “I don’t know, sir—”

  “Find out which one!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  My heartbeat echoed in my ears.

  I wanted to know who was spotted just as much as Will did.

  We waited. The agent stepped on the gas.

  “Copy,” he said again. To Will he said, “It was unit three.”

  We neared another intersection. The light was green. The agent swerved around a car, and the tires squealed. I clutched the door handle to keep me steady and because the closer I was to it, the easier it would be to pull it open so I could escape when the time was right.

  “Give me an update,” Will said. “I want a location on Trev and a sweep of the town, a clearing of the freeway—”

  I glanced out the window, searching for a familiar face. My boys were here. Now we just had to find each other.

  The car raced through the intersection. I pressed my face against the glass, looking ahead for a place to bail.

  Something on the rooftop of a building on the next street corner caught my eye. A figure, arms propped on the edge, a rifle trained on us. At first I thought it was one of Will’s men, covering our getaway, but then there was a pop from below our car, and the driver swerved.

  Another pop. The sharp, cutting sound of metal against concrete. The tires had been blown out.

  There was no way this car was going to make it out of town now.

  I glanced over at Will. Jaw clenched, hands tight, he looked on the verge of hitting something. But below that was a sadness, a fear, etched into the tiny lines around his eyes—he knew he was losing.

  As we crossed the next intersection, and I looked past Will out the window, I saw Sam. I saw him behind the wheel of a black cargo van. Saw him just seconds before he drove that van straight into our car.

  32

  THERE WAS A MOMENT WHERE NOT even the seat belt could keep me grounded. It was as if I were floating. My hair swung forward, blinding me, so that I couldn’t tell which way was up and which way was down.

  Shards of glass bit into my skin.

  When the car landed, the impact slammed me into the frame of the door. Blood ran from a new wound at my temple. It took me a second to realize the car was on its side, that my door was on the ground.

  The car slid that way for several more feet, filling my ears with the hideous scraping sound of crunched metal and scratched pavement.

  When the car came to rest, it teetered before flipping over on its roof, suspending us from our seats.

  “Anna?” Will croaked. He cut his belt loose with a pocketknife and scrambled over the twisted metal of the roof to my side. “Are you okay?”

  “If you’re smart,” I said, “you’ll start running now and get a head start.”

  He frowned and met my eyes.

  It was a test. I think he knew it.

  I wanted to see what he would do. If he ran, then his life and his business and his Branch were clearly more important than family—than me.

  I wouldn’t have blamed him.

  He threaded his fingers through my hair and pushed it back behind my ear. He kissed my forehead, and I shrunk away. “Everything I’ve ever done has been with your best interest at heart,” he said.

  A car door opened and slammed shut somewhere in the street. Tires screeched to a halt. People were shouting. Someone said there was a gun.

  “You did all the wrong things,” I said.

  He pursed his mouth, somber. “I know.”

  He kicked my door open, crawled out, and ran.

  As the shouting and fighting grew outside of the car, I clutched my seat belt, the nylon material digging into my chest. I pressed my eyes closed.

  I could let Will go.

  Or I could kill him.

  There were my options, neither of them good. I didn’t want to kill him, but there’d already been too much death, caused by Will and the Branch. And letting him go would result in so much more.

  This would never be over as long as the Branch was operational.

  We would never be free.

  What I wanted more than anything was some semblance of a normal life, of safety. I wanted to wake in the morning, nothing more than a girl with a boy beside her. A boy she loved.

  I deserved those things.

  Sam deserved those things.

  And Cas. And Nick. And even Trev.

  So had Dani.

  I freed myself from my seat belt, and still shaky with adrenaline, scrambled to the front seat, to the dead agent crushed against the steering wheel, and stole his gun.

  I kicked the passenger-side door till it gave way, and slipped into the light. Fresh air filled my lungs.

  I turned.

  The intersection was a pile of wreckage and a buzzing, flailing mass of agents getting their asses kicked by the boys.

  My boys.

  I locked eyes with Sam across the undercarriage of the car. His face was covered in bruises and scrapes and deliberate cuts, as if someone had tortured him one slice at a time.

  His lip was split on the side. His dark hair was covered in old and new blood.

  An agent made a run for him, but Sam was quicker and slammed a fist into the man’s face. The agent fell over backward.

  Wait for me, he said with a look. Give me two minutes, and I’ll come with you.

  I can’t.

  I didn’t have any minutes to spare.

  I ran in the direction Will had disappeared.

  If I were him, where would I go?

  The airport.

  To his waiting jet.

  It was safe to assume, I thought, that Will would have to find some other kind of transportation to reach the airport. If he still had his cell phone, he’d call in another agent. If he didn’t, he’d probably steal a vehicle or—

  I heard the distant sound of metal rattling, as if a garage door were opening.

  Following the sound, I took the next street, running as fast as the grips on my shoes would allow me. The streets had been plowed, but there were patches of ice here and there, and rivets of slush to navigate.

  I slowed when I neared a car garage, the large bay door open, revealing the inside. Chipped and faded lettering at the top of the building said it was once Nate & Frank’s Garage. Now, instead of broken cars inside its interior, there were rows of four-wheelers, dirt bikes, motorcycles, and two black Suburbans.

  A showroom? Or, more likely, a Branch stock garage.

  The other bay doors were closed, hiding whatever else was inside. I couldn’t see Will from my vantage point, so I brought my gun up.

  A woman stopped me. “Can I help you?” she asked in a tone that said she didn’t plan on helping me with anything.

  I sized her up. She was lanky, with sharp eyes and a straight nose and an even sharper mouth.

  Judging by her clothes—black cargo pants, black undershirt, black armored vest—she wasn’t simply a woman manning Nate & Franks Garage. She was a Branch agent.

  I peered over her shoulder in time to see Will shoot past us on a four-wheeler.

  I watch
ed which direction he went, giving the lanky woman the chance to catch me off guard. She threw a left-handed punch to my cheek that spun me around and landed me on the pavement.

  I lost my gun.

  On all fours, as I tried to catch my breath, she kicked me in the ribs. One cracked. I rolled to my side. She wound a hand into the collar of my shirt and raised me off the floor just enough to punch me again in the face. The coppery taste of blood coated the back of my teeth.

  She pulled a blade from a sheath tucked in her boot and brought it down like a hammer. I caught her wrist at the last second, but my arms shook as the blade pressed closer.

  Look for a weakness.

  With all her energy focused on the knife, she left her side wide open. Using my grip on her wrist as leverage, I brought my knee up and into her ribs. She cried out and shrunk away.

  I scooped up my gun, shot. One bullet to the head. She dropped where she stood.

  I slid my gun in the waistband of my pants and ran to the row of four-wheelers. There were keys already in the ignition.

  “Thank you,” I muttered to no one. I climbed on and started it up, throttling the gas.

  I sped out the bay door.

  Wind cut through my clothes and bit at my exposed skin. The tire tracks of the four-wheeler were easier to follow than Will’s footprints, and before long, I’d left the town behind. I followed the tracks through a patch of dense woods and came out the other side on a railroad line. I could just make out Will’s figure up ahead, maybe a mile and a half away at most.

  I twisted the throttle and the four-wheeler shot forward. Will noticed me with a quick glance over his shoulder.

  The tracks curved inward, hugging a sandhill covered in patches of snow. Rays of sunlight shone over the top, blinding me, so that when I finally drove into the shadow of the hill, I didn’t notice the figure leaping toward me until it was too late.

  Will knocked me from my seat. We slammed onto the ground, and the four-wheeler careened down the tracks before hitting one of the rails and flipping over on itself.

  I bucked Will off of me and reached for my gun, but he caught me with a backhanded slap, and the gun flew out of my grasp. Stars winked in my vision. I scurried over the tracks, fingers scraping against the old railroad ties. A loose one wobbled beneath me, and I felt the sharp pressure of a sliver in my index finger and another in my thumb. I bit back the pain and reached for the gun, just inches away, when a shot went off behind me and a burning, flaring sensation raced up my thigh, vibrating through every nerve in my body.

  I screamed and clutched at my leg, my hand coming away sticky with blood.

  Will loomed over me. He had a cell phone in his hand. “Riley,” he said, “I’m on the railroad tracks about a mile south of Neason Road. I need a truck.”

  Tears streamed down my face. My leg throbbed with the pulse of my heart, and the pain only seemed to get worse, sinking through muscle and bone, aching in a place that was both physical and mental.

  “Have they been taken care of?” Will asked. He waited for the reply. “Well get on it, then.”

  He hung up and slid the phone in his pocket. He crouched beside me. “Let me see,” he said and pushed my hands away. “I tried to get a clean shot, something that wouldn’t cause too much permanent damage.” He pressed against the wound with his fingers, and I arched back, sobbing as the pain laced its way to the center of my gut.

  “You’ll be fine,” he decided. “Look at me, Anna.”

  I sucked in a breath and glanced over at him. “I will take care of you. I promise,” he said, the sharp angles of his face softening in the golden light. “I fixed you once before. I can do it again.”

  “Don’t kill them,” I said. “The boys. Please.”

  Will shook his head. “You’re better off without them. We all are. I never should have let Connor talk me into rehabilitating them. We should have cut our losses and—”

  I wrapped my hand around the loose railroad tie, sand gritting beneath my fingernails.

  Anger and pain and heartache and hope all mixed together and cannoned up my body.

  I swung, hitting Will on the side of the head. He fell back. I grabbed my gun, buried the burn of the gunshot in my leg, and stood to my feet.

  Will looked up at me, sadness etched in the space between his eyes. He parted his lips as if he wanted to say something, but didn’t even know where to start.

  Instead, he said only, “I’m sorry,” right before I pulled the trigger.

  Sam found me first. I don’t know how long I sat there staring at Uncle Will, but it seemed like a long time. Like forever.

  The snow turned black with Will’s blood. The wind slowed and the clouds opened up and snow began to fall. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my toes. I couldn’t feel my injured leg, which seemed a good thing at the time but was sure to be a problem later.

  When Sam appeared around the bend in the railroad track, I thought for a moment he was a figment of my imagination, that I was dying. Or dead already.

  He started running when he spotted me, pausing only long enough to make sure Will was no longer a threat before grabbing me in his arms and squeezing until I couldn’t breathe.

  “Are you okay? Did he—”

  I took Sam’s face in my hands and kissed him. If I lost feeling in every other part of my body, I’d be all right as long as I could feel this: his lips on mine, his breath on my face, his fingers brushing the tears from my chin.

  “I love you,” I said when I pulled away.

  He pressed his forehead against mine and ran his hands through my snarled hair, his fingertips kneading at the base of my neck. “I love you, too.”

  I smiled and closed my eyes, all the tension running from my body.

  And then I was out.

  My head lolled against Sam’s chest. I thought I could feel his arm beneath my legs, and the other wrapped around my waist. I heard the beating of his heart. Or maybe that was mine.

  I couldn’t be sure.

  “She all right?” That was Nick.

  “I think so. We have to get her to a hospital. Will shot her.”

  “Ginger prick,” Nick said.

  Sam tightened his hold on me. “Did you take care of—”

  “Yeah,” Nick cut in. “Cas and Trev moved Arthur to a safe place.”

  “And Riley?”

  He hadn’t ever shown with the truck Will had asked for, and I’d waited. I’d been ready.

  “No sign of him. I hope he ran,” Nick finally said. “Good fucking riddance.”

  33

  I WAS IN AND OUT FOR SEVERAL days. The few times I was in, I heard the distant murmuring of nurses, sometimes a doctor. Shock, they said. Infection. Poor girl, they said.

  I wondered if it was a way of my body telling me it needed rest. Not just because it’d been shot. But because it’d been through too much too soon.

  When I finally opened my eyes and felt well enough to speak, Sam was by my side.

  “Hey,” he said as sunlight poured from the window over his shoulder.

  “Curtains,” I mumbled, my throat raw.

  He got up and tugged the curtains closed, plunging the room into semidarkness. “Better?”

  I opened my eyes slowly. “Much.”

  Seeing Sam beside my bed was enough to put a smile on my face.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did the gunshot wound heal all right?”

  “Drink this first.” He offered me a bottle of water. I started to object, but he shook his head, so I drank. And then guzzled the whole thing down. I guess I was thirstier than I thought.

  After, with Sam’s help, I managed to pull myself into an upright position. When he settled back into the chair at my bedside, I looked him over. The skin beneath his eyes was shadowed and heavy. Stubble covered his face, hiding some of the cuts and bruises that were still healing. His hair stuck up at the crown, like he hadn’t showered yet today. Maybe not the day before, either. There was a long scrape running from the side of
his neck, disappearing beneath the collar of his navy-blue shirt.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  He let out a breath. “How am I? I wasn’t the one who got shot.”

  I looked down at my legs and wiggled my toes beneath the blanket. Everything seemed to be in working order. Thank God. “How long was I out?”

  “Five days.”

  “Five days?” I shrieked.

  “You had a minor infection. The doctors took care of it. You’re fine now.”

  I lay my head back against the mountain of pillows beneath me.

  “And Nick and Cas?”

  “They’re fine. They’re getting something to eat right now.”

  “My dad?”

  Sam went quiet. That old, guarded expression I knew so well returned.

  “Sam.”

  He shifted his gaze to the floor, folded his hands together. “They wiped his memory before we got to him.”

  Crying first thing upon waking after a five-day coma didn’t seem like the proper way to start the recuperation process. And my sides still hurt more than I could describe, and crying would only make it worse. So I bit my lip until the sensation died away.

  Dad, I thought. I’m so sorry.

  “Where is he?” I finally asked.

  “He’s safe.”

  “Where is he, Sam?”

  “A place for senior citizens. He seems happy there.”

  “You put him in a home?”

  Sam straightened, gave me a sad, regretful look. He took in a long breath before answering. “He has lung cancer, Anna.”

  “What? But—”

  “He let it slip when I called him, when we were looking into the coded program.”

  When I’d seen him after leaving the boys, I’d thought he looked unwell. I hadn’t realized it was that bad.

  “He’ll be taken care of,” Sam went on. “He had money set aside for retirement, so the bills are covered. He’s in a good place.”

  I nodded. After everything he’d been through, a home for senior citizens did seem like a vacation.

  “I have to see him.”

  “You will. Soon. You have to rest for now. Geez, Anna, take a break. Everything has been taken care of.”