by Nick Randall
With his other hand, he prodded her in the back with the gun.
I turned to Matthew. His face was ignited with unleashed rage.
“Matthew,” I whispered. “You’ve got to keep lookout behind us. I think he’s just distracting us until they can corner us. Any suggestions?”
Matthew turned toward the back alleyway as I handed him the rifle. We were back to back, then.
My shivering intensifying while I watched Joseph grab the girls and sling them down onto the pavement beside Liza.
“He won’t hurt you, Holly. He . . . he told me he won’t hurt you if, if I tell him about you, about us, our friendship, where we are going. He promised he won’t hurt you.”
Liza shouted it out, gulping down huge sobs in between each sentence.
“I will, however, kill all three of these beauties if you don’t turn yourself in. What a pity. They are so lovely. So young, so much promise. Come on, Holly, you’ve been a bad girl, and you need some discipline. Come on out. I’ll count to ten.”
He started counting slowly and adding to his diatribe in between each number of the countdown.
“Holly, he doesn’t know I’m with you,” Matthew whispered behind me. “He also has no idea that you have a gun. We can use that.”
“I’m going out, Matthew,” I whispered back defiantly. “I’m going to distract him and try to get the girls out of the way. As soon as you see a shot, take it. We don’t have long. The sky’s getting lighter and lighter.”
The predawn grey had begun to chase the darkness out of the sky.
“Okay, I’m going to head a couple of buildings down and try to cut across the street,” just as Matthew said it, I felt him tense and shift away from me.
Gunfire resounded behind me.
I screamed and turned, expecting to see Matthew lying lifeless on the ground beneath me, but I only saw Patrick’s body slumped against the wall behind Matthew.
“Matthew, look out!” I yelled.
Several men had rounded the corner behind him.
I swung around and drew my Glock.
Matthew caught the first one to round the corner, spraying him with bullets.
We flattened ourselves against the wall.
A standoff, both parties waiting for the other to make a move, and then, I heard the gunshot from across the street.
He’d reached 10. I looked toward the truck, trembling in fear.
The older sister was lying face-up in the street, her sister slung across her body, yelling out: “Wake up, Sarah! Wake up, Sarah!”
Joseph leaned down, gently lifting the girl from her sister’s lifeless body.
Cupping her chin and giving her a lingering kiss. She turned on him, a caged animal, desperate for survival.
She grabbed at the gun that hung from his body. I raised my gun and downed the man covering Liza.
He had just pivoted and aimed his gun at the sister. Everything unfolded in slow motion.
Liza gathered her wits, I saw the realization on her face, and I stepped out into the street.
Our eyes met, and she ran toward me. The gun went off as the girl and Joseph struggled for control.
Liza’s eyes widened, a bright wound blossomed across her stomach, flowering out and blooming into a crimson stain.
She looked at me, screamed “RUN!” and slumped to the pavement. Joseph was gaining control of the gun. He knocked the girl out with the butt of the rifle and turned.
He looked up to raise his gun, but he was too slow.
With killer precision, I quickly raised my gun and put a bullet neatly in the center of his forehead.
CHAPTER 8 (Holly)
On the other side of me, Matthew had left the safety of the wall to cover me when I stepped out into the street.
After Joseph fell, I spun around to see Matthew leaning against the wall, again, blood smearing the side of his leg.
He’d won out, though. The last man that rounded the corner had taken on a spray of bullets from Matthew’s gun.
I wrapped his arm around my neck, looked both ways out into the street, and I helped him hobble across to the truck.
The street was empty as the sun began to spray the sky with blood reds and angry oranges. Matthew slid into the passenger side of the truck, his gun lifted and trained against the buildings ahead of us.
I patted down James, feeling for the truck keys, and pulling them from his jacket pocket.
I tossed the keys to Matthew and grabbed the youngest girl and shook her, trying to wake her.
“Come on, Holly! They’re coming down the street!” I looked up to see three men in the distance, walking with purpose towards Joseph’s truck.
They were too far to see detail, but it wouldn’t be long before they realized that Joseph and his man were lying on the street, dead.
I lifted the girl under the arms, trying to drag and push her into the bed of the truck.
“Holly! Get down!” Matthew turned and sprayed the street behind us with bullets.
I looked up to see Steve inching closer on the other side of the street.
I had managed to slide the top half of the girl into the bed of the truck, her bottom half hung limply from the tailgate, feet and legs heavy and dragging. The truck rumbled to a start.
“No, Matthew! No! I don’t have her yet!”
Bullets whizzed past the truck from both sides.
“We have to go, Holly! I’m sorry! Hang on!” Matthew yelled.
He slammed the truck into gear and jolted forward. The girl was too heavy.
After a long night of fighting and fleeing, I couldn’t fight the pavement as it dragged at her while the truck picked up speed.
She slipped out of my grasp, and I lay flat against the bed of the truck, my eyes raking across the unconscious girl and then, Liza’s corpse as Matthew sped out of the town square.
My body finally gave way to great shuddering gasps, as I sat up and clung to the side of the truck.
Rage, pain, weariness, and misery mingling inside of me and emerging in a feral scream, a wounded animal, my innocence dying inside of me.
The sun gave birth to a new day in front of me, but all I wanted to do was lay down and give in to the silence and peace that death offered.
We rode along Highway 129 for an hour before Matthew felt safe enough to stop.
He pulled into a copse of trees along the side of the highway, trying to hide the truck from the roadway.
The bullet had grazed his left leg.
I took a shirt from my pack and ripped it into strips, poured water across the wound to clean it out, and applied antibacterial ointment before tying it off.
It had left a significant gash, exposing the soft pink tissue underneath the skin, but it was superficial as long as infection didn’t take route. I worked mechanically, dry-eyed and empty.
Afterward, he gathered me in his arms, and the warmth of him, the sweet ache of shared loss and grief, coaxed out soft tears of resignation.
We sat like that for a while, unable to move on, but knowing stopping was not an option.
Matthew was the first to break the silence:
“Holly, I never told you how much I admire you. You’ve always had a quiet strength, a steady surety. You know what you want, who you are, and you pursue it with tenacity. But you lift people up along the way instead of stepping on them to get where you’re going. You did that with Liza, and you did it with me. You can’t pass a homeless man without going back to bring him a hot meal; you have to speak against injustice in the world, even if it’s not the popular opinion or the socially acceptable thing to do. You just gather us together and bind us to you, whether you realize it or not. We just want to be near you, to share in your journey, because you are so special, a brightness and warmth that radiates. I don’t really know how to tell you how much I have always loved that about you. I know this has been hell, but you got us out. You saved us. What happened to Liza . . . you did everything you could. Sometimes, the evil in the world overshadow
s the goodness, but you never give up. You keep shining. Please, don’t give up now. I need to know you will keep fighting, so I can keep fighting. Deal?”
“Okay,” I whispered after a couple of moments to take in everything he had just told me, my voice husky with exhaustion. “I promise.”
Matthew cleared his throat.
“So, we are close. Should we ride out the gas in the truck as far as we can? I think day travel might be the best bet now. The roads up here look pretty deserted, and we can get back to the woods when we’ve both rested. I don’t know what to expect from those guys, but I want to put as much distance as possible between us.”
I pulled out my map.
“Yeah, I think we should stick to as many backroads as possible. Straight shot, it’s about 25 miles to Cleveland from here. Norman’s cabin is a day’s hike, 13 miles, close to Blood Mountain. No road access. He had it all filled in and let the overgrowth claim the dirt road when he finished the cabin 5 years ago. We are going to need to dump the truck somewhere to throw them off in case they come looking, too.”
My mind was churning, looking for something to do, anything to keep away the image of Liza’s lifeless figure lying on the pavement.
I drove for the next half hour, winding around the backroads as Matthew rested his leg and navigated, the map unfolded across the car as he pinpointed different roads to try.
Spotting a weathered barn, we finally pulled in to an old farmhouse drive off one of the side roads.
We drove the truck across the meadow. In the far distance, we saw a farmhouse and a new barn, built in back of the house with its own drive. I got out to scout the old barn.
It looked unused, abandoned some years prior. Red paint peeled along the boards, showing the grey faded wood underneath.
I pulled the barn doors open, so Matthew could park the truck inside.
We closed the doors behind us and lay down in the bed of the truck, rolling up into my hammock and falling fast asleep.
CHAPTER 9 (Holly)
I shot up as the daylight faded through the slats of the barn, fighting against the hammock that suffocated me.
I’d forgotten where we were and that I was enfolded in the fabric. My senses pricked when the grogginess lifted, and I realized Matthew wasn’t beside me.
I had fallen asleep with my gun next to me. I reached for it before sliding out from under the hammock and peaking up above the bed of the truck.
I saw a figure slip into the crack of the barn door and stopped holding my breath.
Matthew turned to look at me and offered a sheepish grin.
“I had to go to the bathroom, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he apologized.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I forgot where I was for a moment. We better pack and go. We should get close to the mountain. We can hike into Vogel state park and get to the cabin through there. It will be a 13 mile hike from Vogel. I’m thinking about six miles from here to Vogel if we don’t get lost. The fading light is perfect for that portion. Then, we can stop and rest, wait for day for the hike up the mountain.”
“Got it,” he replied. “Let’s get going. I found a pump in the back of the barn. We can fill our water bags.”
Matthew helped me out of the cab. We both reached over, shouldered our packs, and headed over to the pump. The night was lively around us.
I could hear an owl echoing through the trees in the distance, and the hum of the grasshoppers playing their strings. We were one day out, and I couldn’t wait to see Norman, to feel at home and safe.
Mike pumped the water so I could fill our water bladders and bottles. Afterward, we packed everything up and headed out to highway 19, staying along the treeline near the highway but cloaked in the trees.
The fading day was cool and pleasant, the mountain air and much-needed rest invigorating me. The anticipation carried me forward.
I looked at Matthew and decided I’d finally tell him how much I cared about him once we reached the cabin.
We could start over there, begin a life, build it around the three of us, and hopefully, find others who could contribute.
“How many years do you think we will have until things get back to normal?” I asked after we had walked in silence for a couple of hours.
“I don’t know,” he shook his head with uncertainty. “If it was another country that attacked us, I’m thinking they might invade. We are vulnerable, now. It would have to take the government a while to get the power grid back up and replace all the things that are fried. Right? I’m no expert. I’m just drawing conclusions from the information you gave us that first night.”
We both contemplated the future in silence until we saw lights coming down the road.
We shrunk further back in the trees. An old Jeep rode past us slowly, a spotlight shining out from the side.
We both stopped and crouched down instinctively. I made a quick count of the men left in Joseph’s group.
Matthew had killed two in the alleyway. The third, I had shot. Joseph and his man and James were all dead. Six out of ten. Four men left.
Four men could fit in the Jeep. I had thought they would stay and restock. Why were they here?
The Jeep rode on, slowly crawling down the road. The person behind the spotlight shining it left and right.
When it got further away, Matthew whispered to me: “How much further to Vogel?”
“We are almost there,” I whispered back. “About half a mile to the entrance. We have to turn off to the left.
“Okay. Let’s get further back and try to cut onto the entrance road.”
We veered left and then straightened out again on high alert. The moonlight overhead glowing in patches among the treetops.
It was slow going as our eyes adjusted to the night. The whistle startled both of us. It came from the road ahead. We were so close, I could see the changes in the shades of gray under the moonlight.
The shadows of trees were absent up ahead as the ground ran smooth along a concrete parking lot.
Matthew looked at me, drew me close, and whispered in my ear: “We should split up. I know the map. I’ll find you.”
He cupped my face in his hands and met my gaze.
I shook my head vigorously.
No. No. No.
Three times, but he turned and walked out into the woods to the right, away from our destination. I froze. His shadow blinked out of my vision.
He whistled off in the distance, and the spotlight immediately lit up, shining into the thinning treeline along the edge of the entrance.
There he was, the martyr, giving me a chance to make it.
I looked off into the distance, deeper into the woods and up where I new the mountain loomed before me in the dark.
I started walking quickly, picking my way over roots and through branches carefully in the dim moonlight.
I went up and up and up into the mountain. I climbed further and further until I couldn’t climb anymore, and then, I lay down behind a fallen tree.
I lay down with the night crawlers in the grass and hard, rocky dirt.
I let go of the dreams I’d built in those small, stolen moments a few hours ago, and I slept.
CHAPTER 10 (Matthew)
The light blinded me and a voice ordered him to drop to me knees, hands behind his head.
One of the guys came around holding a gun to my head while another handcuffed my arms behind my back.
“Stand up and walk towards the light,” he commanded.
The spotlight was turned off, I saw two other men seated on the ground near the Jeep. A lantern between them.
I walked forward slowly, trying to prolong the inevitable and give Holly time to escape. The barrel of the gun prodded me forward into the parking lot.
“Sit,” the older man said.
He was older but commanding, not volatile like Joseph. Calculated. Calm. Focused.
“You and your girl caused a big mess. I’m actually thankful that Joseph was a problem that I didn’
t have to clean up. But my nephew James. That’s another story.”
A grimace crossed his face.
“The angle of the wound. She was a good head shorter than him. She had to angle it up. And only a woman would waste the time to leave him like that. Sleeping peacefully, all folded up. Wasting that time while you were tied up in the bar upstairs. Pity. You two would be useful. Good under pressure. Fast reflexes, rational decision making in a crisis. You have my compliments.”