by Alyssa Cole
“Where’s your husband?” Gabriel and I asked at the same time.
“He’s going to your parents’ cabin,” Darlene said in a small voice. “But you’re all here, so no one will be hurt. That’s good, right? Maybe together we can talk him down.”
The baby made a disgruntled noise as she spoke, and she bounced him as if they were at the park and not in the midst of a hostage crisis. The whole situation was surreal, especially because her chipper wrap-up was wrong.
“Is John at the house?” Maggie whispered into my coat. Gabriel and I were already surging to our feet, which answered her question.
Gabriel pulled out the bright yellow walkie-talkie and tried to hail John, but his urgent attempts at communication were only returned with bursts of static. I hated being right sometimes.
“Do you have the keys for the van?” Gabriel asked, stuffing the walkie-talkie back into his interior pocket, and Darlene nodded eagerly, wanting to stay on his good side. “Arden, pat her down and make sure she has no weapons.”
“She’s got nothing,” I said after as thorough an examination as I could manage. I didn’t think a cavity search was necessary, given the layers of clothing we all wore.
Gabriel turned to his sister. “Maggie, have Darlene take you back to the van and release Mom and Dad. Bring them to the house if you can. We’re going to go make sure John is okay.”
Maggie’s eyes widened, or at least the one that wasn’t hidden behind her long bangs. “You want me to go alone?” she asked in shock.
“I trust you, Mags, and I need you to do this right now.” I knew it was taking a lot for Gabriel to send his little sister off into the wilderness with a strange woman. A few days ago he’d barely been able to let her cook for herself, but they both had grown in their parents’ absence. He mussed her hair. “Mom and Dad need you.”
She gave a quick nod of her head, seemingly fortified by her brother’s words.
“Here, kiddo,” I said, tapping her with the Louisville Slugger and handing it over. “I guess it was meant to be yours. Be careful, okay?”
“I will be,” she said. “If I let someone get the drop on me twice in one day, I think my parents would disown me.”
I didn’t think it would be nice to point out that her parents had been held captive for a week, so I simply gave her a smile. The corners of my mouth dropped when I turned to Darlene, who was waiting to lead her to the Seongs. She gave me a look that hinted at solidarity, as though we were on the same team, but I shook my head at her. “You even think about trying something funny with her, and that baby’s gonna need a wet nurse. You understand?”
She nodded, and then they headed off in the opposite direction.
Gabriel heaved a sigh beside me, and I took his hand as we began to pick our way back through the icy snow, retracing our steps and hoping John could hold off Dale until we got there. I was actually hoping that a bear would intercept the guy midroute and eat him, thus saving us the trouble, but it was hibernation season, so our chances of assistance on that front were pretty slim.
“I’m doing a bang-up job here,” Gabriel said as we jogged toward the house, frustration lacing his words. “I’m supposed to be protecting my family, and I’ve let everyone down. Right now, none of them are safe.”
I made a frustrated sound in the back of my throat; it was a tic I’d picked up from my mom, having had it directed my way early and often.
“Let me break something down for you, sweetie. Safety is an illusion.” He didn’t look at me as we hurried over the snow, but I knew he listened as I spoke. “We thought we were safe in our apartments and in our SUVs. We thought our smartphones and our laptops meant we could cocoon ourselves away from the big bad world. But we’re never safe, no matter how long the grace period. You can try to fight it with all your might, but unless you’re some all-powerful being and forgot to tell us, you can’t stop every bad thing from happening. You’re doing your best, and everyone loves you for it. That’s all you can ask of yourself.”
As I said the words, I realized that maybe I should take a bit of my own advice. Beating myself up over not visiting my parents wasn’t going to result in me sprouting wings and flying to Cali. Until I was able to get to them, all I could do was try my best to survive.
Gabriel still didn’t look at me—his eyes were glued to our tracks as we jogged over the snow—but one corner of his mouth quirked up. “So, you’re admitting that you love me for it?” he asked in that low timbre that did things to my insides that no human voice should be capable of.
My heart sped up and my mouth went dry. I really had walked right into that one. “You really are one cocky SOB.”
“‘Combative when asked simple questions.’ Another addition to your patient profile,” he said. He tugged me toward him for a quick kiss as we jogged. Our lips had just met, the sweet warmth a pleasant contrast to the cold, when we heard it.
A shotgun blast echoed through the silent woods.
We didn’t even look at each other, just took off at a stumbling run, both of us knowing that whatever awaited us wouldn’t be good.
Chapter Nineteen
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit!”
I muttered the expletive as I fell repeatedly in the icy snow, each time pushing myself up and trying to propel myself toward John. I would not see him hurt again. I refused. To hell with a bear; I would take Dale to pieces.
Gabriel was faring slightly better, but the ground was treacherously slick and he struggled to keep his balance too. The sky had clouded over, obscuring the sun and smothering the few warming rays that had been bestowed on us earlier in the day. The snow that had melted now refroze under our feet as we ran. I could taste the strange electrical flavor, like a battery on your tongue, that signaled a heavy snowfall was coming.
My lungs burned from exertion and I was really regretting that I’d used the apocalypse as an excuse to slack off on my cardio, but we were finally drawing closer to the house.
“We’re getting close,” Gabriel huffed, slowing down his pace. We needed to be more cautious now. It was dawning on me how dangerous this situation was. This wasn’t two hicks with a slingshot, but a trained soldier who’d just returned from combat and wasn’t mentally stable. He might have already hurt John, and he might hurt Gabriel next. I could lose them both in one fell swoop. My legs stopped of their own accord, bound by invisible bands of fear. I knew I had to go forward, but I stood in place as waves of anxiety pushed at me from all directions. I would have stayed rooted to the spot if Gabriel hadn’t turned and looked at me expectantly.
I had to watch his back. We had to get to John.
I scrambled behind him, trying not to think of what Darlene’s husband might be capable of. There were two of us, hopefully three, and only one of him, after all.
The back of the house was coming into view behind the trees when we heard the sharp snap of splintering wood. Dale stood at the back door, jumping lightly on his toes as if he was warming up before a game. He wore a black-and-gray camouflage jacket with matching camo pants, and it was clear the pattern wasn’t a stylish affectation. He gripped his hunting rifle in both hands before rearing back and kicking at the door with all his might. He wasn’t a large man, but there was a wiry strength to him and a rabid determination behind each blow as he kicked and kicked.
“Get the hell out of here!” John’s voice filtered through the door. “I don’t want to hurt you but I will.”
“And I don’t want to hurt your parents, but if you don’t open this door I’ll blow them away, you greedy bastard,” Dale roared. His voice was furious, as though he had some personal vendetta against John. “Keeping all the food for yourself while folks are starving. I served my country. I deserve that food!”
As we got closer, I could see that the door was starting to give, opening a bit with each blow before being slammed shut. My stomach dropped as I realized what the physics of that meant. John was on the other side, pushing against the door with his fine-boned body.
He wasn’t weak, not by a long shot, but he couldn’t hold out against this onslaught for much longer, while Dale seemed like a kicking machine with infinite energy stores.
“Just go away, you psycho!” John yelled. I could hear frustration and disbelief under his fear. “All you had to do was ask, and I would have helped you.”
“Liar!” Dale roared. He was breathing heavily now, but still trying to get through the back door with single-minded focus. He didn’t hear us coming up behind him.
Gabriel was ahead of me, handgun drawn and almost close enough to pounce, when Dale finally stopped kicking.
“I gave you a chance,” he said, pumping his rifle and blowing a hole through the door.
“No! John, no!” I realized the horrific yelps were coming from my own mouth, being torn from my throat by anguish. There was silence on the other side of the door, but Gabriel was throwing himself at Dale with a roar.
“Motherfucker!” he growled, coming down with an elbow in Dale’s back.
Dale grunted in surprise and stumbled forward, dropping his gun, which skidded across the icy ground. He didn’t fall though. He caught himself midfall, braced himself on his hands and kicked out behind him, catching Gabriel in the stomach and turning the momentum of his furious charge against him.
Gabriel fell to the floor and clutched his sternum, his face contorted in agony. Dale was already on his feet, taking two hopping steps toward Gabriel before kicking him in the side with the form of a seasoned footballer. Gabriel cried out, writhing on the ground. His hands flexed in instinctive reaction to the pain, and his gun fell to the ground.
I watched the scene unfold with a strange sense of dissociation, even as my body was moving to join the fight. This wasn’t how it was supposed to play out, not with Gabriel’s strength and smarts. Everything had gone pear-shaped in a matter of seconds and my brain wasn’t processing this alternate outcome quickly enough. Only when Dale kneeled and snatched up Gabriel’s gun did my neurons start firing again.
“Another one of you greedy gooks,” he sneered, palming the gun. “My grandfather killed lots of you when he served, so I guess I’m just carrying out a family tradition.”
Dale geared up to unleash another kick. I ran from behind him and jumped onto his back before he could let it fly. I was acting on instinct, thinking of nothing but stopping the man with a gun from hurting Gabriel. I realized it was the wrong move as soon as I was on him. His jacket was slippery and my legs flailed as I tried to gain purchase. I struggled to get a forearm around his neck, both to maintain my position and to choke him out, but he pried my arms open and flung me away from him with an ease that was frightening. I was small, but not that small. I’d heard that people who weren’t lucid could have superhuman strength, but nothing could prepare you for being on the receiving end of it.
It seemed to take forever, my flight across the yard, but it had been seconds at most. I hit the icy snow hard, my teeth rattling in my head from the impact. I bounced and rolled a couple of times, a sharp chunk of solid snow cutting into my cheek as I skidded to a halt. The stinging pain and the warmth welling down the side of my face shocked me into awareness.
I opened my eyes and saw something nestled in the small-scale range of ice-capped mountains that had formed in the snow. Dale’s rifle. I looked over my shoulder at Gabriel, who’d scrambled back in some semblance of a crabwalk and was now a few feet away from Dale. The guy had already marked me as down for the count and now ignored me.
“It’s over, man,” Gabriel said in his soothing voice. “You hear that? It’s your wife, and my sister, and my parents. And your baby. You’ve got nothing to win by shooting me. Just be cool and we can figure this out.”
Only after he said it did I hear the sound of tires over hard ice, of snow crackling beneath treads.
“Just put the gun down and let me go see if my brother is okay,” Gabriel said, rising to his feet as he spoke. He kept his hands in the air to show he meant no harm. I wondered if he could see me in the distance, picking up the rifle and heading toward him and the madman.
I wished John would make a noise or a groan or something. This silence was killing me. Knowing that Maggie and their parents were approaching and Dale still had a gun was killing me. I wished I didn’t have this rifle in my hands, this weapon that opened up an entirely new world of responsibility and decision-making.
“No,” Dale said, recalcitrant. “I came here to get supplies for my family and I’m not leaving without them.”
Anger flared in me at Dale’s sense of entitlement. Telling a man to his face that he was going to take what was his. Blue Hat looming above me and the sensation of his body on mine were suddenly as real as Gabriel and Dale. The memory faded, but my hands shook now as I raised the gun and took aim at Dale, trying to recall what Gabriel had taught me. Center mass. Remember the kickback.
“I’m not going to let my brother bleed out. You can have supplies if you want, and no one has to die for it,” Gabriel said. His brow was drawn in frustration, but his tone was calm. There was still a trace of command there, though, even if he wasn’t the one with the gun. He was edging around Dale, making for the back door, and for a second I thought it could work out okay. But Dale began shaking his head furiously.
“I didn’t come here to beg from some gooks,” Dale said through clenched teeth. “I don’t need no charity, and I don’t need your permission.”
“Wait—” Gabriel didn’t have a chance to finish his sentence. Dale squeezed his finger on the trigger. There was a loud blast, and then Gabriel was clutching his chest and falling backward. It didn’t happen in slow motion, like in the movies. One minute he was standing, the next he was on the ground. Shot.
Pain of a different kind ricocheted in my chest as I watched him go down, the beautiful man who’d saved my life and my heart.
This isn’t what’s supposed to happen.
The rifle jumped in my hands and the stock whacked into my shoulder hard, knocking me to the ground. My ears rang from the blast—I had pulled the trigger without thinking, a macabre reflexive reaction in response to Dale’s unfathomable behavior.
Dale’s back looked different now, dark, pulpy fluid staining his camouflage jacket and blood splattering the snow around him before he crumpled into a heap. Darkness ebbed at the edges of my vision as a faint threatened to pull me under, but I fought the disorientation and scrambled over to Gabriel. His chest was heaving and he pulled fruitlessly at the front of his jacket, as if he thought he was unzipping it. There was no blood, just goose down spilling out, but I choked back a sob at the sight of the bullet’s entry hole.
“Please be okay,” I squeaked out. My voice was clogged with tears and I fumbled at his coat with shaking fingers, searching for the zipper. “You’re the doctor and none of us can help you, so you have to be okay, dammit.”
There was a commotion: Darlene’s scream, Maggie’s expletive, followed by John’s voice coming up beside me.
“John!” I cried, torn between elation and devastation. John was alive somehow, but Gabriel was shot.
Behind me I heard Darlene’s hiccuping cries as she stood over the man I’d killed. I couldn’t bring myself to look, especially when the baby’s wails joined with hers, a chorus of choking despair. Gabriel was too important and nothing else mattered until I knew whether I’d be joining her in her grief.
“Shit, I wasn’t fast enough,” John said, dropping to his knees beside me, eyes wide and chest heaving. “When I realized the guy wasn’t going to give up, I decided to head for my hiding space to take him by surprise once he broke the door down. But then he never came in.”
“Walkie...” Gabriel gasped in a strained voice as I finally helped him pull down the zipper. I spread open the coat and ran my hands over his chest. His completely unblemished and intact chest.
“What the hell?” I rasped, tears suddenly pouring down my face, the fat droplets soaking into the material where I’d expected to find a chest wound.
He
reached into his inner pocket and pulled out the now-destroyed walkie-talkie. “I told you this would come in handy,” he said with a weak smirk. His eyes were bright with fear though, perhaps because he knew I was about to tackle him into the snow, raining kisses over his face.
“I thought you were dead, you asshole!” I shouted before grabbing him by the collar and pulling his face toward mine. Our kiss wasn’t sexy and was probably not very pretty to watch, but the warmth that stole through my body when his lips touched mine was the stuff of legends. He wasn’t dead. He was here, and he was mine.
“Where’s my kiss?” John asked, scratching at the side of his nose as he kneeled beside us.
I sat up and grabbed him, pulling him into a bone-crushing hug. I barely saw him through my tears, which wouldn’t stop falling. Their salty warmth stung the cut on my cheek, but John was alive and Gabriel was alive and a little pain was nothing compared to that. “You need to stop scaring the shit out of me,” I whispered on a sob.
“You need to stop molesting my brother while my parents are watching,” he whispered back.
I turned and saw Maggie walking alongside a tall, sturdy woman and shorter, slim man. They had aged since their wedding photo, and both were looking worse for the wear, but they were unmistakably the elder Seongs.
John and I helped Gabriel to his feet and the family converged on one another, hugging, crying and speaking excitedly in Koringlish. Gabriel hadn’t let go of my hand, but I stood outside the circle as they greeted one another.
As his father reached up to lovingly pat his face, Gabe tugged me close to him. “Appa, Umma, this is—”
“John’s roommate!” I interrupted. A different kind of fear made my belly flip. I was happy to have his parents back alive and well, but everything would change now. Once again I felt like an interloper, but this time an interloper who was banging my hosts’ son.
“My girlfriend,” Gabriel said, and hugged me tighter.
“The girlfriend who just saved his life,” John chimed in as he hugged me from the other side.