2020: Emergency Exit

by Hayes, Ever N

  Her eyes were open but barely visible through the bruises on her face. She wasn’t saying anything or even looking around. She seemed to be in shock. Danny carried her to one of the back rooms, where Jenna had been trying to heat up a pan of water on a space heater. Jenna and Tara took it from there. They undressed her and washed her off as she cried. Tara had Hayley put headphones on Emily, who was fortunately still sleeping, and Hayley stayed with her in case the little girl woke up.

  The beaten girl was pretty small, almost exactly Kate’s size, so Kate brought her some clothes. They dressed her and covered her with blankets. She was still freezing, shaking, and crying, but she was also exhausted and close to falling asleep. Jenna and Mom tended to her while the rest of us gathered in the main room.

  “She was raped,” Tara said, confirming her own fears and ours. “Many times it seems, and violently. She is terribly bruised and cut all over.” She paused. “She has a major gash in the back of her head, she’s lost a lot of blood, and she hasn’t said a word other than ‘Abbey,’ which she’s said about a hundred times. We don’t know if that’s her name or not.”

  “Is she gonna be okay?” Kate asked.

  Tara shrugged. I knew this was hitting her hard. She was reliving a lot of painful memories. I kept my distance with no idea how I was supposed to respond.

  Danny was pacing. The rest of us were angry. My Dad and Isaac hadn’t heard the whole story yet, so I filled them in on what I’d seen through the scope. I asked Danny about stabbing the man after he was clearly already dead, and he explained he’d taken the knife off the soldier, had the girl hold it, and then stabbed him with it, leaving that knife there instead of Danny’s. Made perfect sense. So it would be a girl’s handprint on the knife in the guy’s neck. The extra stoning was to make it more believable that the girl had killed the other guy. Strange as it was, that explanation made me feel a lot better.

  Now Danny, Blake, and Cameron were standing together by the front entrance, retracing their steps. Best as they could tell, there would be no way for the enemy to trace them up to the cave, especially if it was several hours before the soldiers’ bodies were found. Just then, Dad pointed to the screen by the front entrance, and we watched as vehicle lights approached from the camp. Danny had dragged the bodies across the tracks they’d made running onto the road, and dumped them in the ditch, but it might not have been enough. It was possible the approaching soldiers would see the extensive blood on the road. We held our breath as the truck passed below us, and Danny scrambled up the tunnel to watch from the ledge as the vehicle crawled towards where they’d picked up the girl. Fortunately, it didn’t stop there. The truck drove all the way to the intersection with the main road and then stopped, its driver apparently trying to decide whether to go left by the Sheep Lakes or right towards Estes Park.

  He went right, returning about forty-five minutes later and driving back to the camp. Our best guess was it had been the other guy, or guys, who had been with the two men Danny and Blake had killed. When the men hadn’t come back, he’d decided to go look for them. He—or they—clearly hadn’t been able to find the others, so they must have decided to head back to camp and look more the next day.

  The girl we were calling Abbey, for now, had finally fallen asleep in Jenna’s arms. Jenna was running her fingers through Abbey’s hair and gently rocking her back and forth. Mom had rejoined Dad in the other room and Tara was now laying beside Abbey on her other side, also asleep. The others started to settle in. I told Danny and Cameron to get some sleep. Blake volunteered to watch the screen, and Hayley and I headed up to the ledge to keep a lookout. Tomorrow was going to be an interesting day.

  FORTY-SIX: “Abbey Or Not Abbey”

  It had been a rough night for Abbey. She’d woken up in a panic several times, but Jenna had been right there each time to calm her down. We still weren’t certain of her name, and she’d stopped saying Abbey, but now she wasn’t saying anything at all. And she wouldn’t let Jenna leave her. Tara had suggested we men stay away from her. We understood.

  Sunrise was a little bit after 7 a.m.. The two bodies were found beside the river closer to eight. Within minutes of their discovery, about sixty men had gathered below our cave. They had searched around the road for tracks, but finding none, they’d kind of stopped looking. Danny watched from inside our back entrance. Several soldiers had looked up into the hills and cliffs around us, but no one had even walked up into the woods in our direction.

  Two specific men seemed to be the center of attention. One seemed to be in charge, perhaps the camp’s ranking officer. The other was clearly getting chewed out. The man under fire was probably the guy who had turned back last night, before the other two were killed. He had also probably been the man driving the truck searching for them last night. Danny watched as the apparent officer smacked the other man several times, kicked him, and then smacked him some more. The other guy just took it. He was probably thankful to be alive.

  A little after ten, a helicopter flew in from the Alpine Visitor Center. It landed at the Endovalley camp and a few minutes later flew back the same direction it had arrived from. Danny guessed it had come down to pick up the bodies. The helicopter told us there was at least some communication between the top of the hill and this camp. That could be useful information down the road—honestly, no pun intended there.

  There also appeared to be communication between the Alpine Visitor Center and Denver. Shortly after noon we heard the echoed thumping of helicopter blades again, and Blake told us he’d seen it flying towards Denver. There had been a lot of back and forth traffic through the air in Denver’s direction this week. Someone there was clearly interested in this specific area. Eddie must have told someone we were up here. It was the only thing that made sense. Even still, all this attention to track down one family seemed a little much. How are we any threat to them?

  The girl we called Abbey slept restlessly until around three. Emily was naturally curious about where she’d come from and why she was crying. Hayley had told Emily we’d found her outside last night and rescued her, but she was really afraid and didn’t want anyone to see her, so Emily stayed away.

  She wouldn’t eat, but she was drinking a lot of water. She still hadn’t spoken to anyone, not even Jenna. Mom convinced her to take some soup around four, and around five we were sitting around the main room talking when the girl came out of the back room with Jenna. Her eyes flitted around at us, and then they froze on Emily. The girl started to panic and dropped to her knees, pointing at Emily, and she started saying “Abbey” again. What the…

  Jenna tried to catch her, but she didn’t need to. The girl had wrapped her arms around Jenna’s legs and was sobbing again. Jenna tried to lead her out of the room, but she wouldn’t move. Why was she pointing at Emily now and saying Abbey? I figured everyone else had to be wondering the same thing. Tara knelt down beside her and put her head next to the girl’s. A couple minutes later she stood and helped the girl up. She coaxed her back into the other room with Jenna’s help and then a few minutes later came back out. “I know who Abbey is,” she said quietly.

  I felt like we could’ve heard a leaf land outside at that point. “It’s her twelve-year-old sister,” Tara continued, looking deathly pale and probably thinking of Emily. “And they have her at the camp.”

  FORTY-SEVEN: “Paper Cuts”

  I’ve got this thing against pedophiles—and drunk drivers. Okay, so who doesn’t? Pedophiles, I’d like to see them burned at the stake, but that’s never been legal. So they’ve existed among us, and we’ve always had to wonder who they are and how close they are to our kids. Were our kids safe around anyone anymore?

  I’ve always been of the opinion that convicted pedophiles, if there was physical evidence to find them guilty beyond any doubt, should have the word “pedophile” tattooed on their foreheads. They should have to wear a mark that screams, “I abused children” everywhere they go. They don’t deserve to hide. If they even deserve to liv
e.

  Yeah, that’s how I used to feel.

  And drunk drivers—I always felt similarly strong about drunk drivers, long before Sophie was killed by one. If you get a DUI, you should lose your license. Get a second one, they should take you to Malaysia or Singapore—wherever—and cane you. You should never have the option of getting a third, but if you did? Well, then you outright deserve to be shot.

  Again, that’s how I used to feel. Strangely, that all changed when Sophie died—at least towards drunk drivers.

  When Sophie died, I learned the strongest force in life is guilt. The hardest thing to overcome is shame. You have to look yourself in the mirror every single day and account for everything you’ve done wrong. You can’t take it back.

  Sure, some of these people are ill. Some of them might not even be able to control themselves. Pedophiles, alcoholics, they are by their nature terminally sick people. And they’re habitual. It’s never just one child, one mistake, one accident. They keep going back to the bottle. They keep going back for more.

  The last one is only the last one until there’s the next one. They deserve a beating…but beatings always end.

  Guilt, on the other hand, doesn’t stop. It never stops hitting you.

  I’m not God. At some point I not only could acknowledge that but also learned to respect it. Who’s to say what His master plan is? With so many wicked and evil things happening to so many good people, there’s no way we can understand. It’s surely not our place to.

  But my intense judgment of others softened when I realized in many ways I was equally as bad as some of these other people—albeit at an entirely different level. As I carried the burden of even the littlest things I’d done wrong with Sophie, I could suddenly think of no better payback for the bastard who had killed her than to have to live with his mistakes for the rest of his life. I no longer wanted him to die. I didn’t want him to find a way out. I wanted him to always know what he’d done and never be able to forgive himself. Perhaps that was even more wicked of me. The truth had to really suck for him.

  He got five years for killing my wife. Five years. At the time of the attacks he still had two of those left. He probably died in a cell in the attacks. If that was the case, he got off easy. I’d rather he still be alive. I’d rather he still be waking daily to, and tossing and turning nightly from, the re-creation of his every mistake…that he be hating himself more and more every day. I wanted him to live to death…long, slow, and painfully. That’s what he deserved.

  I didn’t want that kind of sentence for the men at this camp. I wanted them to die today, but wanted their pain to be physical. I wanted these men to die slowly, yes, but to bleed out from a million paper cuts. They needed to pay for what they did to this poor girl. And if they had done the same thing to this girl’s twelve-year old sister…well, there would be no forgiveness in my heart for any one of them.

  If you think that’s harsh, imagine someone doing it to your child, and you’ll share a tub of popcorn with me while we watch him die. Truth is, you’d want to hurt him…in the worst possible way.

  The truth is a little too honest for some people.

  We all wanted to do something about how we were feeling. You could sense the tension in the room and couldn’t have begun to cut into it with a chainsaw.

  I could only imagine what Tara was going through, sitting beside the girl, reliving her own worst memories, and then looking at Emily and imagining it all happening to her daughter as well. How Tara could sit still beside that girl without exploding was beyond me. But then, I knew there was another side to that coin too.

  Tara didn’t want her to feel alone, not even for a second. No one but her parents had been there for Tara. No one had saved Tara. It took her almost twelve years to even look at a man and hope for something good. Yeah, Tara knew how to handle this because she’d lived it. She’d carried a shame with her over something she hadn’t even done wrong, and been burdened by a guilt she never should have had. Tara knew what this girl was going through and how long it would take for these wounds, emotional and physical, to heal. The rest of us had the luxury of not knowing.

  We were “fortunately ignorant.”

  Hayley finally gave a voice to our rational side. “We can’t do anything about this, guys.”

  Danny agreed. The rest of us continued to fume.

  “I’m serious,” she continued. “If we go down to that camp now, and let’s say we can even take all of them out, what good would that do us? We don’t have a way out of here. They’ll just send more troops. Way more.” She let that sink in a little. “I know this may be hard to even imagine right now, but what if they haven’t done anything to the little girl?” She was right about one thing. Not one of us found that thought the least bit imaginable.

  “Hayley, seriously,” I cut in.

  “She’s right,” Tara spoke up behind me, making me jump. “If anyone goes down there now, we’re all dead.” She looked at the floor. “It kills me to say this, but the best payback may just be escaping all this.”

  “You can’t really mean—”

  “Maybe,” Danny cut me off, also not totally agreeing. “But I can’t leave that little girl there.”

  “Okay,” Tara said with an edge to her voice. “So what? How are you going to save her without losing your own life, or costing all of us ours? What if you go down there, and it’s too late? What if any of us does something that ends up hurting the rest of us? If we save one little girl, would it honestly be worth it?”

  Emily probably shouldn’t have been listening to this, but she was, and none of us were ready for her question. “What if it was me, Mommy? Would you come get me?”

  Her question gave me chills. I swear I even saw Dad shudder. I saw tears start to form in Tara’s eyes as she knelt beside her daughter. “Emily. Of course I would, honey.” She hugged her tightly. “Of course I would.” She was looking right at Danny then.

  I looked at Danny too as he nodded. Message delivered and received. Just because she said what we all were thinking didn’t mean that’s how she really felt. But it needed to be said. She didn’t want us to leave that girl down there, either. “Midnight,” Danny said to Blake. “Wake me up at midnight.”

  FORTY-EIGHT: “Zero Dark Forty”

  Saturday, November 28, 2020.

  Estes Park, Colorado.

  Danny always loved Capture the Flag. The goal of the game was to somehow get into the enemy base and take the other team’s flag without getting caught. Danny, of course, was a natural. He and his friends played it at school when they were young, using flag football belts to determine “life” or “death.” Lose the flags Velcroed to your waist, and you were “dead.”

  As they grew older, they upped the ante and played it in the “back forty” at our rural Pine Island home—though it was more like twenty acres than forty—with paintball guns. A shot to the chest or back, and you were out. Hit someone in the face or head, and the shooter was out.

  Tonight’s version was upping the ante even more. The “flag” was a twelve-year old little girl. The “back forty” was more like a million acres and professional soldiers with assault rifles were guarding it. Any kind of shot whatsoever, and you were probably dead. Permanently. Shots to the face or head were fair game. It was a very different game, indeed.

  Danny and Cameron got up at midnight. They pulled on their “ghost suits” and covered those with the Soviet white-camo snowsuits from the army surplus store in Fort Collins. I handed them each their R11 and handgun, gave them both a fist bump, and they exited the cave. Blake and I headed up the tunnel to our lookout ledge and crawled out as far east as we could for the best visual of the road to the camp. It was windy and snowy, making it too slippery to reach the level we normally could watch from. As a result, we unfortunately wouldn’t be able to see their progress much past the falls, probably no more than a half-mile away.

  Danny figured it would take them about an hour to walk the mile and a quarter to the camp
. It had started to snow around ten and was coming down pretty heavily now, which they both did and didn’t like. Progress would be achingly slow, but at least there weren’t likely to be any troops out in this. There’s no way Middle Easterners could like this weather. On the other hand, Danny and Cameron knew if they went the easy way—maintaining cover under the trees—those tracks wouldn’t fill in as well, perhaps not even by morning, so they had no choice but to approach the camp in the open. That made the two of them easy targets if anyone were sitting outside on watch. They were being mindful of their steps and had methodically made it about halfway to the camp when all hell broke loose.

  When Blake and I heard the first two gunshots, they made us jump all the way back on our ledge. Crap. Downwind from the camp, every sound in that direction was considerably amplified tonight. It was almost as if the shots were fired right next to us.

  Then a barrage of shots in rapid succession echoed around us. We could see small flashes of light in the direction of the otherwise dark camp, but we had no idea what they may have been shooting at. Then we heard what sounded like a car, followed seconds later by headlights cutting down the dark road towards us. The camp was starting to light up in the distance, and we could hear a crescendo of yelling. What was going on?

  “There’s no way Danny and Cam made it there yet,” Blake whispered, and I nodded. Agreed. It had only been thirty to forty minutes tops, since they’d left. We were frantically trying to find any sign of them through our scopes, with no success. The first set of headlights approached below us, belonging to a military jeep. It raced past our perch, whipping dangerously back and forth on the snow-covered road. Two minutes later, two more sets of headlights approached and two more jeeps raced by. The initial vehicle had turned right. The next two split up. It almost seemed as if they were chasing that first jeep. There was still no sign of Danny or Cameron.