by Dana Fraser
“Shoulda gone north, girlie,” he mocked. “Maybe someone’s reopened the underground railroad for folks like you.”
More passengers had stopped staring away and were looking out the windows of the buses. Tonya tried to make eye contact with each and every one of them as the cop took his time touching around her breasts.
She wondered if they were prisoners, too.
“You got anything tucked inside here?” the cop smirked, his hands tugging at her t-shirt in an attempt to slip under the fabric.
“Cut that shit out,” a voice growled, his tone filled with a very real menace. “You’re gonna get the bitches on the bus all riled up. And that pansy-assed cry baby up front.”
“Finish with them out in the woods,” he added, jerking his head in the direction of the tree line on the west side of the road.
“Finish, finish?” the cop searching Tonya asked.
“Yeah, I’ll tell these civilians we’re just sending them on their way and making sure they are far enough out they can’t track back to steal anything.”
Apparently the boss of the Lindy Falls cops, the man stepped in front of Tonya. His nostrils pressed flat together, like he couldn’t stand to have to smell her. “You go quiet and I promise one bullet in the head for each of you. Raise a fuss in front of these fine folks on the bus, and we’ll tie you to a tree and start with your feet, shooting our way up inch by inch.”
She stared at him, her full, rounded lips beginning to quiver.
“We have an understanding?”
She nodded. Leaving her, he turned to Samson, asking the same question and receiving the same response.
He assigned two of the cops with assault rifles to march the Anders family into the woods. He ordered them to keep it quiet, one shot each, then come back with the claim that they had been attacked by the family, the shots fired only as a warning.
Trying to hide their grins, the two cops prodded at the Anders family, herding them toward the tree line.
Carefully picking her way through the overgrowth, Tonya kept looking over her shoulder at the two guards. They weren’t thinking about the danger they were potentially in.
Why should they? They had assault rifles aimed at the backs of their prisoners. But they were distracted, arguing as friends or co-workers might as to which one of the women had the finer ass, Tonya or Genevieve.
“Won’t know until we strip the pants off,” the one behind Tonya answered. “Girlie is packing a lot of muscle.”
Knowing they had specific plans that didn’t include killing her family as soon as they were a sufficient distance away from the buses allowed Tonya to calm down and focus her thoughts. The men, in their boundless arrogance, were making one mistake after the other. They were looking at her and her mother’s butts and thinking with their dicks. They hadn’t cuffed any of the Anders, not even with cable ties.
“Damn it, Samson,” she sniped loudly, trying to get her brother’s attention. “I told you we shouldn’t have taken that damn road.”
The cop behind her laughed. “Always fighting each other when they should be fighting us.”
She glared at the cop over her shoulder, her temper flaring for real when he winked at her then rolled his tongue in a disgusting manner.
“And that damn football helmet!” she continued, channeling all her fury at the cops as she berated her brother
“Tonya,” Genevieve whispered, her tears freely flowing. “Samson didn’t do anything…why—”
“Bitch, you are always taking his side!” Tonya screeched then looked at her brother.
Samson stared at her, his eyes narrowed with the same concentration he applied to all the complicated mathematical equations that made up his world. The road remark had caught his attention. He hadn’t offered any navigation suggestions. Her mother had picked the route, the entire family worried about going too close to Fort Campbell after what that Bobby Joe Gallows had said on the radio.
Most telling of all, she had never, ever called her mother a name like that. There was no talking back in the Anders house, no door slamming or eye rolls, and no swearing.
She jabbed a finger in his direction, its tip pointed not at him but at the big tree they were coming up on. “This is just like that time with Frankie Carr at the campground when you punked the fuck out!”
Samson blinked once, the reaction slow and filled with understanding. A second later, as he cleared the big tree, he tripped. Seeing her brother go down, Tonya shoved her mother to the ground then leapt across her to disappear behind another tree. Gunfire chased after her, but then the cops swung their rifles back to the path in front of them where only Genevieve remained, fear freezing her body to the ground.
“Please, don’t hurt my babies,” she begged. “They’re good kids. And you’re good men. You don’t need to do this.”
“Skank - you don’t get it,” the second cop laughed. “We want to.”
Something rustled in the bushes off to the second cop’s right side. Both men swung the barrels of their assault rifles in the direction of the rustling. Tonya snuck forward with a heavy branch, zeroing in on the one who had been following behind her. She swung the branch against the side of his face, tearing open the skin on his cheek.
His rifle, pointed at his partner, let off a three round burst.
“Run, mama!” Tonya screamed as the injured cop seized up, his finger squeezing off a series of aimless shots.
Samson rushed from the tree with a heavier branch, screaming like a banshee as Tonya wrestled with the first cop’s arm to keep him from aiming his rifle in her brother’s direction. She fell to the ground with the man, felt the rifle jerk with another three-round burst.
“Get the hell out of here, Samson!”
She bit at the cop’s hand, trying to get him to release the rifle. Her family needed the weapon. They had too far to go to reach the Dover homestead without some kind of protection.
“Go!” she screamed again, the rifle jerking.
A hand wrapped around her ankle. It was the dying cop. He’d abandoned his rifle but pulled out his side arm and had it pointed at her.
Snatching the football helmet off his head, Samson slammed it against the man’s head as Tonya jerked back, ripping the assault rifle from the cop she had been fighting with. She dropped one hand to his belt line and grabbed his pistol. Jumping to her feet, she stared at her brother.
“Which way did mama go?’
The Anders family ran through the rest of the daylight and into the night before falling asleep at the base of a tree, their arms wrapped around one another for warmth and comfort. When the sun came up, they picked fallen leaves and twigs from one another’s hair, their minds too numb from the prior day’s horrors to make any plans right away.
When she could see that her mother’s hands had finally stopped shaking, Tonya stood, pulled her necklace off and checked the compass. She watched the needle settle on true north. They had to travel in a slightly southwest direction, maybe twenty miles — preferably without running into anyone.
Catching her mother’s eyes on her, she smiled softly. A little more than a year ago, the summer her family had spent a week on the Dover homestead, she had been crushing hard on Cash Bishop. She’d followed him around like a puppy eager for a pat on the head or a stroke along the spine. When he talked, she listened. Samson probably wouldn’t remember which mushrooms, nuts or berries were safe to eat because they didn’t have any numbers or crazy Greek letters attached to them for his mathematician’s brain to process. But she remembered.
“It’s okay, mama,” she told Genevieve. “You got us this far. I’ll get us the rest of the way.”
Chapter Six
Sitting on a wooded bluff that looked out over the main drive into the Bonnie Lad Academy, Ellis finished packing his last paper shell. A mess of empty containers and packets surrounded him. There were bottles that had held potassium nitrate, sulfur, isopropyl alcohol and Stump Remo
ver, the last ingredient pinched from the greenhouse instead of the chemistry lab.
The paper packets that had contained aluminum powder and ammonium nitrate had been repurposed to use in rolling the shells. A fine dust from charcoal he’d reclaimed from the outdoor barbecues by the lake coated a saucepan also found at the lake.
Next to the pan were flakes of plastic insulation from the copper wiring he’d stripped from the barn and snipped into small, sharp pieces to pack into the shells.
Three empty condom wrappers completed the scattering of debris.
“Probably gonna blow my arm off,” he grumbled, adding the shell to those already in his right pocket.
His hands were bloody from working non-stop. After resourcing everything he would need and carrying it up to the bluff, he had dug a Dakota fire pit to keep the smoke from giving away his location. Then he set about cooking some of the ingredients while cutting up the copper wire.
He felt like he could sleep a whole day and still be exhausted when he woke up.
He was hungry as fuck, too.
Pulling out his binoculars, Ellis pointed them in the direction of the dorms. His former classmates had given up looking for him overnight. He figured there was an even chance they would re-start once it got light again.
He couldn’t make it easy for them, and he had to be ready when the time came. Getting on his knees, he cleared the screen of foliage from the top of the fire pit and pissed on the flames. Next he pushed dirt until the hole was half filled. Gathering up the litter around him, he shoved it into the vent hole on the pit and what remained of the fire hole before packing dirt and covering the site with a fallen branch and pine needles.
Shouldering his pack, Ellis returned to a spot on the bluff where the ground had been too hard and the tree roots too plentiful for him to dig the fire pit. The way the trees clustered together formed a natural hunting blind. He could tuck himself against one of the trunks, keep an eye on the road and the dorms and be invisible to anyone coming up on his location from behind.
At least he hoped he would be invisible.
Hannah stopped half a football field away from the administration building of the private academy her stepfather had stuck Ellis in. Her mouth twisted with the sour taste of the only fight she’d had with Thomas Sand.
It didn’t matter that Ellis was her stepbrother. He had been five when her mom had married his dad. She had been sixteen. In some ways, she felt more like his mother than the woman who had birthed him or her mother acting as his stepmother.
Rebecca Sand was not the warm, fuzzy kind of parent. She had given Ellis the same kind of present for his sixth birthday as she had given Hannah at five — a book of cryptographs.
When Thomas had decided to enroll Ellis in a glorified reform school, Hannah had felt like it was her son being shipped off. But she’d been powerless to stop it. She had no legal standing to object.
“Please be okay,” she whispered, her finger hovering over the button that would turn off the Honda.
A new twist puckered her mouth. She couldn’t ignore the fact that she was at an all-male reform school where the youngest would be in the ninth grade. Everyone there was likely taller than her, even the freshmen.
Maybe she should just roll down the window, honk and scream for Ellis?
“So empty,” she mouthed, staring at the administration building, its front door hanging on by one hinge.
Trash littered the porch of the dorms. Everything looked abandoned.
Reaching across to the passenger seat, she wrapped her fingers around the handle of the long, fixed blade she kept in her GOOD bag. Holding it tight, she put the car in drive and let the automatic fuel pump engage the engine so that the Honda slowly sailed to the front of the administration building.
She’d go in there first and hope they had a paper file on each student with the housing assignment recorded.
Shutting off the car, Hannah stepped out. Wind caressed her cheek. She thought she heard her name, just the whisper of it. But, when she turned to search, she saw no one.
Her legs stiffened. The building’s interior was dark.
Ominous.
Stop it! You’d go into a burning building for him. Shadows can’t hurt you!
No, they can’t, she agreed. But what might be hiding in them could.
Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a flashlight no bigger than her thumb and clicked it on, the light beam thin and feeble, but welcome company as she took her first step inside.
She swept the beam along the doors in the hallway, reading the plaques on them. She hadn’t been in the building before or she would have remembered which room was which.
“Do you see her, copy?” a radio squawked. “She just went in. Can you hear me, copy?”
Her legs froze. She clicked off the light, plunging the area around her into darkness. She needed to back out, return to the car and retreat to a safe distance while she formed a plan.
Flashlights clicked on around her, their beams pointed at the leering faces of two boys big enough to be senior and a male old enough to have a thick scrub of facial hair.
“That’s Sand’s sister,” one of the boys said. “I’ve seen her picture.”
The oldest of them stepped forward. Seeing his face that close, she knew he wasn’t a student.
“Little bastard kicked me in the nuts a couple days back,” he hissed. “I owe him a beat down.”
Hannah took a step backward, her face cold as the blood drained from it. Taking another step away from the older male, she felt a wall of flesh behind her.
Thick fingers coiled through her hair.
“More like he owes you,” a voice laughed. “Maybe she can pay up for him?”
“Hey, Martin! You in there, knuckle dragger?”
Hearing her little brother’s voice, Hannah laughed, the sound skating along the edge of hysteria. He was alive! He was also doing what he did best — pissing people off. Only these people wanted to hurt her and Ellis, so maybe pissing them off even more was a bad idea.
“Take her to the door,” the scruffy male ordered, striding past Hannah to lead the way.
The radio squawked as she was dragged to within a few inches of the open doorway.
“He put his pack in the car.”
Mr. Scruffy — Martin, she guessed — smirked and called out. “You planning on going somewhere, Sand?”
“Yeah, your funeral.”
Ellis ran his hand along something. She couldn’t see what it was, the shape made vague by the nervous sweat dripping into her eyes despite the cool October air. All she could make out was something long and metallic.
Martin doubled over laughing. Now that he was out in the daylight, she could see he had a knife in one hand.
So did she, Hannah remembered. They hadn’t taken it away from her, maybe didn’t even realize she had it since she was still in the shadows with whoever had a tight grip on her hair.
“What the fuck, Sand?” Martin called as he made a show of throwing his knife so that it stuck in one of the boards on the wooden porch.
Arms spread wide, Martin stepped away from the administration building, fingers wiggling as he dared Ellis to charge him.
“You think you’re gonna beat me with a pipe?” he yelled. “Do I look like a whiffle ball to you, Pee Wee?”
The boy holding her hair snorted with amusement. She leaned forward, coaxing him to follow, her grip on the knife tightening.
It wasn’t one pipe Ellis was holding, it was two, the smaller pipe placed at the front and sliding like a trombone into the larger pipe.
Ellis looked toward the doorway, tipped his chin up. “You cowards gonna watch the show from back there?”
Her captor gave a nudge forward. Flattening the blade against her leg, she obeyed the prompt. She expected one of the other boys leaving the building to shout that she had a knife, but all eyes were riveted on her baby brother and the man named Martin.
She saw that Ellis had left both doors o
pen on the Honda and its motor was sputtering along softly. She smiled, thinking about how he had volunteered to help her program the car with her biometrics.
He must have put his in at the same time.
Little stinker.
Damn, I love him.
“Hey, Sis,” he said, his voice raw with a vulnerability she didn’t expect.
“Hey,” she answered back, throat clogging with emotion.
“Aw, how sweet,” Martin jeered, moving until he was no more than a foot out of reach from the pipe. “Nice family reunion. Tell you what, you can watch while I f—”
Ellis slid the small pipe forward then jammed it back.
A crater blossomed in Martin’s face.
“What the f—”
Her captor didn’t get to finish his sentence. Hannah jabbed backwards with the knife, hitting the meaty flesh of his thigh and sinking deep. She yanked the blade out as his grip loosened in her hair.
Bolting forward, she saw Ellis drop another shell into the pipe device and turn just in time to plant another crater, this time in a boy that had run out from the tree line to rush him.
“Get in the car!” he yelled.
She ran toward the driver side door, slashing wildly at one of the boys who had followed her out from the administration building. He lunged for her anyway, his hand disappearing with another blast from Ellis’s makeshift shotgun.
Diving into the driver’s seat, Hannah slammed one foot on the brake, the other on the gas, and slapped the transmission into drive as Ellis sprinted in front of the Honda on his way to the open passenger door.
“Behind you!” she screamed, the warning reaching him too late.
A behemoth of a boy came up behind Ellis, knocking the pipe out of his hands. Goliath threw an arm around her brother’s neck, his free hand wrapped around a butcher’s knife, the blade pointed at Ellis’s throat.
Hannah did the only thing she could think of.
She took her foot off the brake.
Chapter Seven