by Dan Padavona
Will rubbed his temples, thinking that if Victor Lupan wanted this job done a certain way, then maybe he should bring his ass down to the Sunshine State and do it himself.
As though she read his mind, Lorna shook her head disapprovingly and said, “This isn’t some kind of joke, Will. If you don’t get the job done, Lupan will come to Florida. And when he gets here, he’ll come looking for the one who let him down.”
“You mean he’ll come looking for us. This was a two-person job last time I checked.” Her hands were on her hips as she paced the sidewalk, her shadow elongating with each stride as the sun descended to the tops of the stores. “I said I would take care of it tonight.”
She spun on him, her mouth twisted with disgust. “You’re a fool, Will, if you think Viper won’t see you coming.”
Goddamn, his head hurt. “You want me to finish Lupan’s job or not?”
“I want you to use your brain for a change. Outsmart this Neanderthal. You can do that, can’t you?”
He jumped to his feet, hands clenched into fists with a building desire to permanently rid himself of Lorna, perhaps violently. Yet she appeared unafraid in the Florida evening, a look of arrogance on her face. He started toward her and stopped, seeing her eye the crowbar. She stood closest to the weapon, and if he made an aggressive move toward her in his groggy state, she might beat him to the crowbar. And then what? Her lips curled into a smile.
“Don’t even think about it.” He relaxed his hands, feeling warm blood course back into his fingers. “That’s a good little boy.”
She circled him on the sidewalk, her eyes running up and down his body as though she were assessing what to do with a misbehaving dog. When she bent to grasp the crowbar, his body went rigid. But she didn’t lash out; she handed the weapon to him, that same knowing grin painted across her face.
What’s she up to?
Sauntering up to him, she caressed his face and playfully ran a finger from his chin down to his navel, and when he was certain she meant to dip her hand lower, she reversed course back to his chin. He allowed himself to relax, and that was his mistake. She produced the switchblade from inside her shirtsleeve with blinding speed, and before he reacted the blade snapped upward, the sharp tip pressed to the soft underside of his chin. It took his full concentration not to tremble, which was exactly what she wanted, and yet a cold sweat broke across his brow, belying his calm exterior.
“If you’re gonna kill me, then do it.”
Her face stoic, Lorna’s eyes danced with wild laughter. The blade tip ran across his skin, tearing through stubble and cutting a fine ribbon of pink. He waited for her to plunge the blade up through his chin, leaving him to bleed out in the final vestiges of daylight. How poetic, he thought.
Will shut his eyes when the blade popped down, disappearing into her sleeve as quickly as it had appeared. He exhaled, and she smiled wide, showing the whites of her teeth.
“A lesser man would have pissed his pants by now. Maybe there is still some hope for you, Will.” She turned her back on him, surveying the parking lot, almost daring him to make a move. “Someone is going to die tonight, but there’s no reason it has to be you.”
He hated her. As she strode off the curb toward their vehicle, expecting him to obediently follow, he wanted nothing more than to slam the crowbar against the back of her skull. Instead he stood obediently, her little lapdog.
“Where are you going?”
She didn’t bother to look back at him. “Come on, Will. It’s time to catch a snake. He has to be somewhere around here.” She laughed at her own joke and climbed into the car. He watched her go, anger boiling his blood.
When he hadn’t moved for several seconds, she rolled down the window and called back to him. “You coming or not?” She exhaled loudly. “He’s predictable, Will. He’ll check on his lemmings at Florida Bliss, just like he does every night. And he’ll take the same route to the interstate that he always takes. All we have to do is get there before he does.”
Biting down on his tongue, Will walked to the car. He climbed into the passenger seat and stared straight through the window, feeling her bemusement as she started the engine.
A moment later they cruised up the commercial roadway, past the hollow frameworks of shopping malls, ten-minute oil changes, cafes, and fast food restaurants. The wind still carried a hint of greasy fries, and the scent of spoiled dairy seemed to drift from everywhere. Blank streetlights swayed with the seabreeze, electrical lines swaying and bouncing like the world’s largest jump rope. Out to sea, lightning flickered between two black clouds, and the surf pounded the shore with more urgency. Will and Lorna went snake hunting.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tree House in the Sky
The sun disappeared behind the sprawling wilderness, the forest floor cloaked in grays that progressed toward blackness. Breathless with sweat pouring off her, Amy pointed up into the trees. When Keeshana looked up, she saw a glut of thick, crossroad branches blotting out the sky. A sea of green leaves covered the limbs, letting through intermittent glimpses of twilight.
Keeshana wore a puzzled expression. “What am I looking at?”
Amy put her hands on her hips, trying to pull enough air into her lungs to speak. “Look closer. Over the branches.”
Keeshana squinted harder, but she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary until Amy came to her side and pointed beyond the boughs. She followed Amy’s finger until she realized the barrier between sky and ground was not just branches but planks of wood.
“Is that a tree house?”
Amy smiled. “Yes.”
“Where in the heck are we?”
“We’re about a half-mile back of my old house. This is where I used to play when I was a kid.”
“No offense, South Carolina, but you haven’t been a kid in a long time. You sure those boards are gonna hold us?”
“Every kid in the neighborhood adopted this tree house at one time or another. If anything ever needed fixing, there were always a few kids keeping up with the maintenance. I bet you anything that the tree house got handed down to this generation of kids.”
Keeshana still wasn’t convinced the fort was safe, and when she saw how steep the climb was, the days of her youth felt as though they had occurred a few centuries ago. Besides, she hated heights. As she contemplated making the climb, a branch snapped not far from where they stood. Eyes wide in the descending gloom, they ducked beneath a low canopy of oak leaves, their bodies pressed against the trunk. The air was humid and stagnant here, the hoary light of the forest seeping through the leaves and fading fast. The forest went still, the paralyzed silence which pervades when a predator is near. For a long moment, the only sound was their own slow breathing. Keeshana had started to relax when rustling leaves and crackling twigs marked someone pushing through the forest about fifty yards away, coming toward them.
Amy whispered, “Follow me.”
Keeshana looked up at the old oak, not seeing any way to scale the tree. But Amy scooted up the trunk as though she were twelve again, playing hide-and-go-seek with her friends. Before Keeshana protested, Amy disappeared into the leaves, the soft jiggling of branches marking her ascent. Then Amy was gone, and Keeshana crouched alone under the oak, heart pounding.
“Kee.” Amy whispered from high up in the tree. “Hurry up.”
More branches snapped, closer this time, popping across the wilderness like fireworks.
“Kee. Come on.”
This is crazy.
Now their pursuer was close enough for her to hear the thud of footsteps against the forest floor. Trying not to think about what she was doing, Keeshana wedged her foot into the rough trunk, simultaneously leaping. Her fingers caught hold of a branch, allowing her to inch her way up the trunk. Amy had scaled five times Keeshana’s distance in this amount of time, making Keeshana feel very much out of her element. Walking her feet up the trunk, she caught hold of another branch, this one several inches above the last. She kept walki
ng and pulling, walking and pulling, at every moment believing she would fall and break her neck. She looked down—a mistake—and gasped. She couldn’t see the ground anymore.
How high up am I?
Keeshana had never trusted high perches, not since falling off a tall slide when she was six. Hands gripping the branches, she recalled playing in a busy park on the suburban outskirts of Atlanta, several kids vying for the top of the ladder at once, pushing and pulling, laughing and calling each other names. Keeshana’s foot had slipped from the top rung, and suddenly she lived a waking nightmare, the plummet off the cliff, into the bottomless pit, off the skyscraper, this time real instead of dreamed. She began to squeal, and as she looked up, she saw two boys staring down at her, mouths agape in silent screams. The boys, the top of the slide, and the sky hurtled away from her as she waited for inevitable impact with the ground. The earth flew up to meet her, blowing the breath out of her body, fracturing her arm, and knocking her unconscious.
She blinked, hearing the footfalls come closer. The acoustics of the forest played tricks on her, causing the cacophony of breaking branches to echo across the wilderness, making the pursuit seem to come from everywhere at once.
Don’t think about how high up you are. Just climb.
So she climbed. Her muscles rippled under her skin in mirror images of the taut, gnarled branches she grasped. Moving from branch to branch, each a stepping stone leading to eventual safety, she edged her way higher. She could no longer see the ground, which was blotted out by the mass of green oak leaves and thick branches. But Keeshana knew she was high up, probably higher than she had ever climbed in her life. The prospect of being this far off the ground, just a misstep or failed grip away from a fall that would break her neck, forced a scream up the back of her throat. Yet there the scream stayed, her desire for self-preservation winning out over sheer panic. The pursuer, the maniac from the red Camaro, was somewhere below on the forest floor. She sensed him in the darkness, stalking quietly through the trees, eyes fixed on the shadows.
A twig crackled just below her, and she froze. Holding her breath, she listened for the driver, hearing insect songs rise up from the depth of the wilderness all around her. But not directly below where the madman crept—all remained quiet here, the nearby forest denizens gone into hiding. For a long time she remained fixed in this position, feet precariously balanced upon a bending branch, arms wrapped around a thicker bough, the strong scent of chlorophyll in her nostrils, oddly reminding her of mowing her Atlanta backyard.
The limb under her feet bent a little more. The strain of her weight was too much for the limb, and if she stayed here much longer, the branch would crack like a bull whip and give away their position. If only the pursuer would move on. But she sensed him directly below, the hate rising off of him and drifting up the tree as a poisonous cloud. Again the limb bent. It was too dark to assess how close the bough was to breaking, but Keeshana knew she was almost out of time. Straining, she clasped her arms around the higher branch to relieve the lower branch of her weight. Leaves rustled softly as the branch sprang up, a whisper which might have been loud enough for the madman to hear.
She held her breath, as if producing enough silence could erase the earlier rustle of leaves. Anything could have made that noise—a squirrel jumping from branch to branch, a bird landing. She closed her eyes and prayed the man had not heard, willing him to believe the noises in the tree were just forest animals scrambling down the boughs.
Leaves rustled loudly below. Her heart pounded as she imagined the insane driver, the man who killed Jeremy, crawling up the tree toward her. She was trapped with nowhere to go. She could continue climbing, but he would follow her until there were no more branches to ascend. Keeshana felt stupid for letting Amy convince her to climb the tree. They should have kept running. They should have—
More rustling and a snap of brittle brush underfoot, this time a good distance past the tree. She let her breath out, heart speeding like a rabbit’s, gooseflesh covering her arms and legs. When she heard the man run deeper into the wilderness, she climbed with renewed vigor, moving steadily upward from branch to branch, no longer thinking about heights, falls, and fractured arms.
“In here.”
Keeshana was surprised to hear Amy’s whisper from just above her head. She glanced up and saw the floor planks of the tree house, and after climbing out upon a stout branch, a trap door opened next to her head. Amy’s hand reached out to grasp hers, and Keeshana scrambled into the tree house.
Suddenly the fear of heights returned to her, and as she slouched in a corner, she imagined the tree house unable to hold the weight of two adults and tipping off the limbs. As though Mother Nature desired to further unsettle her, a gust of wind shook the tree. The floor trembled under her, the supporting boughs groaning like old witches. Something skittered across the roof, and it took a moment for Keeshana to realize the sound was only wind-blown leaves brushing against the shingles.
“You can relax,” Amy said. Moonlight filtered into the tiny room, and Keeshana was astonished to see not one, but two windows built into the walls. “This tree house has survived twenty years of summer thunderstorms and a few hurricanes. It’s safer than most houses.”
“If we were any higher, I’d start looking for a beanstalk growing through the clouds.” Keeshana shook her head and buried her face in her hands, knees drawn up to her chest. “Why did I let you talk me into this?”
Amy’s eyes seemed to glow in the moonbeam as she crouched silently across for Keeshana.
“Hey, South Carolina, are you sure you didn’t recognize that guy?”
Amy shook her head, her eyes trailing off through the window as though the answers she sought were hidden within the trees. “He’s not from Chardray, and I definitely don’t know him from Atlanta. But…” Her eyes grew haunted, a child’s eyes listening to the long talons of branches scraping across her bedroom window at midnight.
“Yeah?”
“But I have this crazy feeling like I should know him, and that doesn’t make any sense. I swear, Kee. I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“Something tells me he’s seen you before, Amy.”
Amy shuddered. Another gust rattled the house, making Keeshana’s heart leap. She was at the mercy of the wind, perched high above the earth like a hatchling bird quivering in a nest. The wind died down, and all that remained was the song of crickets which seemed to stretch into eternity.
“Sometimes my friends and I would come up here and pretend we were being chased by bad guys or monsters.” Amy’s lips curled into a rueful grin. “Is that what’s happening to us tonight, Kee?”
Keeshana rolled over and leaned on her elbow. “I don’t know. A lot of crazy things have happened to the world in the last week. Maybe he’s just a regular guy who went a little crazy.”
“Like the man who followed us from Atlanta?”
Looking out the window, Keeshana saw the anguished face of the moon staring back at her. She didn’t want to remember the man with the baseball bat from Atlanta or think about how he knew to track them to the Sanders residence in the Georgia countryside. “Maybe so, South Carolina. Maybe so.”
“That’s two people who have tried to kill us.”
“Atlanta was a bad place, Amy. If we stayed, trouble would have caught up to us eventually. As it were, trouble followed us out of the city. It has nothing to do with us. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Then explain what happened to Chardray. Kee, someone—probably that maniac—burned the village to the ground. That doesn’t seem like a coincidence.”
“Shh. Keep your voice down. You want him to hear you?” Keeshana crawled over to the window and looked down, half-expecting to see the lunatic’s face pressed against the glass, eyes bloodshot and craving murder. But there was just the dark canopy of leaves and limbs, and beyond that, utter blackness. She moved away from the window, believing that if she looked long enough, the crazed driver wou
ld break through the sea of leaves and ascend the boughs. “Anyhow, it doesn’t matter if that guy, or kid, or whoever he is, knew you. All that matters is we don’t run into him again and we get to someplace safe.”
Amy choked back a sob. “I don’t think there are any safe places left in the world.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. Jeremy wasn’t safe where he was, and now he’s dead. Grady isn’t safe. And now we’re on the run from someone we don’t even know.”
Keeshana didn’t argue because she had no argument to make. As she slouched against the wall, running her hand through sweaty strands of hair, she listened to the wind howling from high up in the trees. Her thoughts returned to Grady and Bo, and suddenly she wished they had stayed at the old farmhouse. There was safety in numbers, or at least she wanted to believe that much was true.
For a long time they sat awake, listening for the rustle of leaves and the snapping of sticks to warn them the crazed driver had returned. In the wee hours of the night, their eyelids grew too heavy to hold open, and they drifted off to sleep on the worn slats of the tree house floor.
Amy and Keeshana awoke Sunday morning to whistling birds and a sticky dewiness, the morning already thick with heat and humidity. Scattered, golden rays of sunshine twirled against the dusty windows of the tree house, illuminating the interior with flaxen streaks that shifted when the leaves moved. The rumbling in their stomachs alerted them to their need for food, but neither wanted to eat; Keeshana’s thoughts kept returning to Jeremy, and she worried about Grady and Bo alone in the farmhouse. Amy didn’t talk much as they descended the tree, but the perpetual crease across her forehead made Keeshana believe Amy fretted, too.
Amy remembered the way back to her old neighborhood. As they walked through the wilderness, Keeshana following Amy, animals skittered under flora just beyond the edge of their vision. Keeshana’s senses were attuned to the forest sounds, listening for signs of their pursuer, while the southern heat pressed down on them. As if a wall evaporated, they broke abruptly out of the trees, the sickening charcoal smell cloaking all. The charred destruction of Chardray spread out before them, and Amy dropped to her knees and cried for a long time until Keeshana coaxed her to keep moving.