Red Man

by catt dahman

  “Got it.” She let him kiss her before calling everyone back over.

  Dana asked Taryn to boil water to sterilize the instruments she wanted to use. Kelly stretched out on the kitchen table and gritted his teeth.

  “You can yell or whatever, cry; it’s gonna hurt,” Charlie said, holding his other hand.

  For some reason that made John laugh, and Dana had to threaten them so she could get control of the situation. As Dana was cleaning the wound again, Kelly suggested she enjoyed dishing out pain. “You’re into this; admit it.”

  “Oh, yeah, Baby.” Dana slid a thin blade into the wound, and Kelly went rigid, taking a deep breath and trying to think beyond the pain. In a few minutes, she yelped with excitement and extracted the .22 LR bullet. “You’re lucky it wasn’t deep.” She asked Taryn to hold a clean cloth over the wound as it poured blood.

  John took the bloody brass bullet to examine it and then tossed the twisted thing into the trash and grimaced. “He could have taken you out, Kelly.”

  “I know. They saw the cabin and how we left it, and they’ve been in the other cabin…maybe…I don’t know who is there, but Mark Banner is the one who shot at me. When I rolled, I busted up my ribs.”

  “I’m not a doctor, and I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Dana as she shook, “but I think a tiny bit, and you would be bleeding out.” She packed the wound and wrapped it. Afterwards, she fashioned a sling and told him to keep his arm totally still and against his body.

  “They planned to keep playing to pick us off,” John told them, “My God, they’ve lit the other cabin.”

  He stared out at the flames dancing and darting in the misty rain. The roof was too wet to burn properly, but the inside was heating up fast as the wood and furnishings burned, alongside the bodies of the dead. “They’re trying to get us to show.”

  Bev sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, shivering and crying.

  Taryn, pale, cleaned up after Dana. “Come on, Bev, we’ve gotta get moving.” She reached down and pulled her friend to her feet. Five of them stood in the cabin, ready to go. John said he thought they should go north to the Ranger’s station, get medical help for Kelly and Taryn, and get out of the area.

  “We’ve got flooding and can’t go anywhere but north. The river is coming up fast, and the roads are gone.”

  “John, did you notice they are burning that other cabin and are shooting people?” Taryn asked. She handed Bev a sweater. Standing lop-sided because of her swollen ankle, Bev pulled on a jacket.

  The window in front of her exploded.

  The second shot hit Taryn in the head.

  “No.” Charlie launched herself past Bev and dropped to the floor beside Taryn. Brushing her red hair off Taryn’s forehead, Charlie sobbed, pushing the mass of bloody hair away so she could see Taryn’s bright green eyes, but her friend stared into nothing. A neat hole marked the pale flesh.

  Kelly used one arm to pull Charlie away, and he, John, Dana, and Bev huddled behind the sofa. “She’s gone. Let her go, Charlie.”

  “This is all about me. I can’t take it anymore, seeing everyone I love killed. I would rather give myself to Mark Banner and be done with it.”

  “You can’t. My goal has been to keep you alive. The future is not set; we can make it,” Kelly hissed at her.

  “Not me. I am supposed to be okay,” Bev babbled. “He almost hit me. Why? I was supposed to be okay.”

  “What are you talking about, Bev?” Charlie asked, her eyes on Taryn.

  “I was promised. They said I would be okay. Why did he almost hit me?”

  John and the rest looked at her.

  “I was supposed to make sure we took Lofton Trail. That was the plan. I didn’t know about the rest: Leila and Anthea. I didn’t know.”

  “You were supposed to get us on Lofton trail so they could hunt us?” Charlie asked.

  “I didn’t know what they would do. They said I would be okay. Charlie, you have money and so do you, Dana. I am behind on bills and about to be evicted. You have no idea what it’s like.”

  “I would have given you money.”

  “I did it, I can’t take it back, and they are all dead now.”

  “How much was it worth? What were our lives worth?”

  Bev pulled away and sat alone. “No one was supposed to die. They said just to make sure we took that trail. I thought they would go after you, Charlie. It was supposed to be just you, and then they got Anthea and Leila, and oh my, God, Taryn. Poor Taryn.” She ran a finger through the blood on the floor as she was thinking.

  “What was I worth? What did they pay you to make sure I was in a place to die?” Charlie spoke quietly.

  “Ten thousand.”

  Charlie laughed, knowing she was almost losing her mind. “I would have given you ten times that, no questions asked and no payback. That’s all I was worth to you? We were The Butlers. I don’t give a damn.”

  Bev traced an imaginary design on the floor, “Those guys, Cody and Rick and Chris, that was so funny. I was the one helping, and they didn’t even notice me. They wanted Dana and Taryn. And then the other two were drunk, and they didn’t notice me. No one ever notices me.” She was getting louder.

  “This is about bad self esteem, not getting laid and taking ten thousand dollars to make sure I die?” Charlie marveled. “That’s unreal, Bev.”

  “It’s your fault that Anthea, Carla, Leila, Holly, Taryn, and the rest died. How does that feel, Bev?” Dana asked.

  “He almost hit me,” said Bev looking angry, “and here we are with men around, and you get one, Charlie; guess Dana gets John. Again, no one notices Bev.”

  “Ten thousand,” Kelly said.

  A barrage of bullets made them dive lower, seeking safety. John motioned them to crawl after him, and they made their way into the back bedroom of the cabin. “We go out and head north. They’re coming in the front.”

  Kelly shook his head, “We’ll be moving targets out there.”

  “But it’s cloudy and getting dark, so we can stay away from the burning cabin and make our way north. If we stay, they’ll burn this place around us.”

  “I am supposed to be okay,” Bev whined.

  With sudden fury, Charlie swung as hard as she could and caught Bev in the jaw. Bev crawled away, rubbing her jaw and crying, “You hit me.”

  “That was for Anthea. Imagine what I am going to do for the rest. I shouldn’t have believed you when you made up the lie about that paper I found.”

  Kelly pulled her away.

  John crawled out the window and helped Dana, Charlie, and finally, Kelly who moaned as he tried to keep his arm still and close to his body, but the bandage was soaked with blood. He steadied himself by holding on to Charlie.

  They moved away from the fire and into the murky shadows, ducking into the wet underbrush. Another volley of gunfire hit the cabin, making them wince. Dana wrapped more gauze and cloth around Kelly’s arm and bit her lip; he was bleeding badly. She warned him that he couldn’t keep going like that, but he reminded her there was no choice.

  Kelly pointed his gun at Bev and said, “If they said you’ll be okay, then you will be, but if you set this up, you aren’t going with us.”

  “You asshole, I can go, Dana?”

  Dana turned away.

  Bev stepped away and glared as they left her.

  As they ran, Charlie felt the ground go out from under her as she slid down a muddy embankment, twisting and slipping. When she finally came to a stop, she struggled to catch her breath. Tears of pain and frustration filled her eyes. Kelly checked her, and they found her leg had caught a sharp branch and was cut deeply, almost to the bone.

  “Give me your tee shirt.”

  Charlie stripped off the muddy sweatshirt and then her tee shirt and put the sweatshirt back on, hating the way it felt cold and heavy with mud and rain. Using the sleeves, she wiped mud off her face.

  Kelly tore her tee shirt into long strips, using his hurt arm, and making i
t bleed more. With her help, he wound strips around her leg, caking mud into the bloody wound. “It’s bad, but you have no choice but to walk on it.”

  “I guess you know how bad it is.” Charlie set her jaw and fought the dizziness when she put weight on her injured leg. There was no way she could walk with it torn up and bleeding, but she had no choice; if she thought about it, she would start screaming.

  Gunshots echoed around them, seeming to come from several directions but not at them.

  Yet.

  Charlie walked along side Kelly; her blood ran down her leg and into her boot. His blood dripped off his hand. They felt watched and waited for a bullet to hit them, but nothing happened. They just walked. At the top of the slope, they found they were right back at the burning cabin and hadn’t made any progress.

  “Where is Dana?”

  “I don’t know.” Kelly couldn’t be sure, and he wasn’t psychic, but he felt deep in his gut that Mark Banner and his men had found John and Dana and had taken care of them. “We need to head north. That way….”

  Kelly was about to say more when liquid fire filled his head, and darkness followed. He passed out as the stock of the rifle cracked his head. He slumped to the ground. Tired, hopeless, and angry, Charlie faced her adversary and said, “Just do it, you son of a bitch.” She looked calmly at the barrel of his gun.

  “Got ‘em. One is down, but both alive,” the man yelled over his shoulder.

  A figure, wearing grey on grey, came out of the misty rain with his only noticeable characteristic: a big, wide grin. He wasn’t a large man, he wasn’t a scary monster, and yet this was the person behind a dozen deaths. Here was the man who never should have known the future, but he did and was determined to change it. It wasn’t natural.

  Here was Mark Banner.

  Part 2

  Chapter 9

  “You’re nothing. Really. All this. You bought my friend, killed my other friends and all over a future that never had to be. We could have talked, and it never had to come to this.”

  “You could have gone down easily. You made it this difficult. I set the men loose and let them play, but if you had just gone down, we could have ended the game.”

  “To go back knowing all this, maybe I would. But maybe I was meant to survive and face you like this. Just walk away. Then we’ve changed things, and it’s all okay.” Charlie attempted to reason with him.

  “The future isn’t set in stone. I don’t know how it works or why Sam was able to do what he did, but if I let you go, then nature…the future, whatever you call it, will try to stay aligned. I have to do this. It takes something very big to alter what could be.”

  “You’re insane. This is insane. My head is done in from trying to understand what can’t be explained. Do whatever you want, but let Kelly go.”

  Mark looked at the still form on the muddy ground and said, “He spied on me. He knows way too much.”

  “As if anyone would believe it anyway. Let the rest go.”

  Mark shrugged. “He is all that’s left, besides you.”

  Kelly stirred and said, “Let me tell him goodbye.”

  The other man took their weapons and stepped back. Kelly leaned his head against Charlie, moaning and said, “I want on my feet. I ain’t dying in the damned mud.”

  Charlie gritted her teeth, holding back screams of pain, and got him to his feet. They stood together, both muddy, bloody, and exhausted; their eyes remained defiant. Kelly took her into his arms and sighed, “Do it.” He held her tight, wanting his last thoughts to be about her.

  Mark took aim and hesitated, his head cocked in a curious manner. Right in front of him, the air rippled and reminded Mark of the way gasoline fumes shimmer or hot pavement sends up rippled air. Something very unusual was occurring.

  The ripples danced and melted into the shape of a man. Features began to form, and in another second, Sam was standing in front of Mark. Charlie and Kelly stared with shock.

  “Of course. You were already here, so you have to be here now.” Mark said, “My God, there’s a certain law or logic here.”

  “Why are you holding a gun on Charlie?” Sam asked. He looked at his estranged wife, bleeding, wet, and tired. Her eyes were smudged underneath. Beside her was a very tall man with red hair and a red beard and bronze skin. He had jaunted to this place this time for Mark, to the time when Mark was to kill the bothersome detective, but that didn’t explain why Mark was holding a gun on Charlie. “We were in my den…”

  “When you came back, you were gut shot, and you told me Charlie was going to kill me. I couldn’t let that happen, Sam. When you go back, you’ll tell me all this before; well you don’t make it, Buddy.”

  “I’m here again. It’s all a circle, isn’t it? You plan to kill her so it changes the future?”

  “He hired men to stalk me, and they got ‘Thea, Leila, Holly, Dana, everyone,” Charlie said.

  “I have to change it, Sam. I figure you will go back and will be gut shot, dunno when or how that’s gonna happen, but I want to live.”

  Sam lunged at the other man, and Kelly joined in. They rolled in the mud and fought over the gun. For a few seconds, Mark and Charlie just watched, surprised by the sudden attack on the man. The gun was loud when it went off, and no one moved but waited, wondering. Scared.

  Kelly rolled over, a spreading stain soaking his shirt. Charlie screamed.

  As Mark raised his gun to shoot her, Sam jumped up, holding the other man’s gun and shot the man in the head. Unfortunately, Mark pulled the trigger at the same time, and the bullet meant for Charlie hit Sam in the stomach.

  “No, oh no, Sam.” Mark Banner squatted down to reach for his best friend, his face a mask of horror as he realized he had been the one to kill Sam. “You’ll be okay, I….” Mark realized that Sam was about to jaunt back to his past with a gunshot to his belly, and Mark was to blame.

  Time had rules.

  There was no other possibility. Before Mark could take it all in, he was tackled by Charlie who was rapidly losing strength and was drawing on a reserve of energy. Almost too easily, she snagged his gun from his hand and put it right against Mark’s eye.

  “There was no way to change it. It was set because of Sam,” Mark said in a kind of wonderment, “all this for nothing.”

  “You got that right.” Charlie pulled the trigger and continued to fire bullets into the man’s skull until she was dry firing and stopped shaking and crying. She crawled to Kelly, hugging him and telling him it was over, but he didn’t move, and the blood on his chest soaked her. It was warm.

  The future had been set, and this was when Kelly died.

  Raising her head, she screamed, a guttural and primal noise of pain, loss, hatred, and futility. All this trouble and days of terror and pain, and it ended just as it was set to end, and she was the only one left.

  “Is he dead?” Sam asked.

  Charlie nodded, pulling herself to a sitting position. “You should have never done what you did. It was evil, and it ended badly.” As she said the last word, hysteria set in, and she laughed crazily for a few seconds and repeated, “badly. Ended so badly, I declare.”

  She crawled to Sam, her knees bruised and cut by rough stones. Her hands were bloody and ragged from the trees and rocks; several nails were torn off. “You go back and tell Mark, and this happens again and again. Oh Sam, we’re in some time warp that repeats, and forever I get to relive the hell I am in right now.” She laughed insanely again.

  “That’s the detective?”

  “Yeah, Kelly. He saved me a few times but this was the last. You went to his tomb of death. Wow, Sam, you just screwed me over so many times. I had to watch him die.”

  “You cared about him?”

  “Yep, I did. I fell in love with a good man finally, not one who was cold and mean and jaunted through time so that all my fucking friends have been slaughtered. I got to watch the man I love die. And if it circles, I get to do this shit forever, so way to go, you asshole.” Char
lie lay back in the mud and let the rain drizzle over her face, not caring about the pain in her leg or anything but the futility of everything and how she was in a circle of hell.

  And all things at the worst minutes of her life, who, but Sam was there to talk to. Oh kill me now, she thought because this is really cruel, Karma.

  “In a minute, I go back to die,” Sam reminded her that he wasn’t supposed to be there.

  If she thought about it much, she’d go stark raving mad anyway. “Happy trails. Your funeral was a nice one, in case you care.”

  “What if I don’t tell Mark? What if I go back and say nothing?”

  “Destiny. It is what it is, I mean seriously. You go back, and you tell. And this happens. It already has. We’re talking about going to the past now, right? Do you know all that time warp shit makes my head ache?”

  Sam was in terrible pain and bleeding badly, but he concentrated and said, “It can change. Mark tried to change it at the wrong place.”

  “Theoretical time travel? If I had my cell phone we could run it by Stephen Hawking, ” Charlie babbled.

  “I don’t have much left here. If I go back and say, ‘shoot Mark’; then what will happen?”

  Charlie tried to think, sat, and said, “Then he can’t hurt my college friends or pay off Bev or decide to kill me, and Kelly will be alive and will close the case for Stephanie Banner.

  “You’ll never meet the detective.”

  Charlie’s jaw dropped. She would have to let him go. It was an easy choice, so she said, “I want him to live. I love him enough to let him go.”

  Charlie crawled back to Sam and held his hand. “Thank you.”

  “It’s what’s right.” The pressure and warmth of his hand began to fade, and she could hardly see him. He faded before her eyes, and she was left with her hand in mid-air. She looked around at the carnage and watched the last of the cabin burn; it became darker all around her.

  Afraid and alone, she went back to Kelly and stretched out beside him, hoping she could just die next to him. She laid her head on his bloody chest and pretended they were resting. As she lay there, a strange feeling came over her, and she hoped it was death, but it was more like a humming from inside her body as if her bones were vibrating.