by Blake Crouch
The boy veered off the straight trajectory he’d been running and shot up the low-hanging branches of a live oak.
Ten feet off the ground.
Panting.
His feet eviscerated.
For thirty seconds, he couldn’t hear a thing over the pounding of his heart and the desperate intake of oxygen.
When he finally caught his breath, he strained to hear the sound of Ben’s footsteps.
Sweat trickled down the bridge of his nose, burning his eyes.
He clung to a fat, knobby branch with one arm and plucked a series of thorns out of the back of his leg with the other.
There it was—forty, maybe fifty feet away—brittle leaves crunching under footsteps.
Winston yelled something from the beach.
Ben was moving toward Luther’s tree now—he could hear the man forcing his way through bushes, the occasional crack of a branch breaking.
“Boy!” he yelled. “I don’t hear your footsteps anymore. You ain’t that fast, which means you’re somewhere close by, hiding behind some tree, or in some goddamn bush.”
Luther spotted him—twenty-five, thirty feet away—standing absolutely still. A bit of moonlight had wandered in through the branches and it lit Ben’s face with a pale and ghostly glow.
“I’m gonna make you a deal right now, little man. You come out from wherever you’re hiding, I won’t hurt your sister.”
Luther squeezed his eyes shut with such a fierce intensity the tears could only leak out.
“But let me tell you what I’m going to do if you ain’t standing in front of me in the next thirty seconds. I’m gonna borrow Winston’s knife—you saw it right?—and go to work on her pretty little face. You’ll hear her screams all the way from the beach.”
Ben started walking again.
The sweat on Luther’s hands made it almost impossible to grip the bark, and he had to squeeze his thighs against the steep branch to keep from sliding.
“You’re a little chickenshit, ain’t you? Run off and hide to let your family suffer alone.”
Ben stepped directly under Luther’s branch and stopped.
Luther’s chest pounded against the bark, his muscles cramping, tears and sweat stinging in his eyes.
“Ten seconds,” Ben said. “Then I’m walking back out onto the beach. Come out right now like a good little boy, I’ll spare your sister. Won’t make no other promises about nothing else, but she’ll live. I am a bad, bad man, but I ain’t no liar.”
A mosquito wailed into Luther’s ear.
He didn’t flinch.
Let it land just inside the canal. There was a brief, cutting itch, and then numbness.
“All right,” Ben said. “You’re making this decision, little man. Nobody but you. Hope it haunts you the rest of your days. You change your mind, you know where to find me. Just follow the screams.”
Ben turned and started back through the trees.
Luther craned his neck to watch him go, the man passing in and out of patches of moon- and starlight until he reached the treeline and vanished.
For a long time, Luther clung to the branch and cried.
Mosquitoes swarmed him.
He asked God to stop this from happening.
Kept shutting his eyes and opening them again, telling himself every time that it was only a nightmare. That he’d wake up in his bed on the third floor of their stone house on the sound and none of this would be real. He’d walk down the hallway into Katie’s room, crawl into bed with her and snuggle close until the after-fear was gone.
Five minutes after Ben had left him, it started.
Three voices—his mother crying, his sister screaming, his father begging.
All merging into a cacophony of grief, pain, and terror.
Luther scaled down the tree and ran.
He could barely see through the tears, the thorns in his feet sending stabs of pain up his legs.
At last, he broke out of the trees.
Saw the bonfire in the distance, flames twisting in the wind like braids of orange hair.
The sand felt better than the forest floor. It still held some warmth from a day of baking under the sun.
Luther sprinted, the noise of his family getting louder.
He collapsed at the foot of the dunes and crawled through sea grass to the top, where he lay breathless.
The bonfire raged thirty yards away.
Katie was hogtied and writhing like an earthworm, screaming incomprehensibly, Rufus right there beside her, screaming, “Please! Please! Please!” in a guttural expression of absolute horror.
Maxine didn’t make a sound.
Luther couldn’t see anything but his mother’s swollen face, and he didn’t understand what Winston was doing to her.
The man’s pants were pulled down to his knees, and he was lying on top of Luther’s mother, moving back and forth, back and forth.
Maxine wasn’t even crying.
Her eyes were wide and she looked like she was someplace else entirely.
In a daydream.
Another world.
Years later, he would catch her staring off into space with that same catatonic emptiness, and wonder if she had returned to this moment.
“Mama,” Luther whispered. “Oh, Mama.”
The man who’d chased him into the woods stood over Rufus and Katie, pointing the shotgun at them, but watching Winston and Maxine, his meaty face sweaty and smiling in the firelight.
Luther grabbed a handful of sand and squeezed, his knuckles blanching, but it didn’t do a thing to temper the fire that had begun to smolder in his belly.
Winston hit his mother in the face and told her to make some pretty noise.
Luther crying angry tears now.
His mother said something that caused him to hit her again, and this time, she cried out and made a strange noise.
Winston didn’t hit her again, just moved over her faster and faster.
Rufus said, “Close your eyes, Katie. Go someplace else.”
Ben said, “Little girl, if you close your eyes, I’ll fucking cut you out of your skin.”
Luther clambered to his feet, took two steps down the dune, and stopped.
He turned around, went back to his hiding spot.
Wept bitterly into his shirt.
If he ran down to the bonfire and tried to stop this from happening, he’d only get hurt, tied up, maybe even killed.
He was five years old.
Tiny.
Weak.
Slow.
He couldn’t stop anything.
Couldn’t save his family from these terrible men.
The complete helplessness crushed him under terror and shame—a weight he would never be rid of.
Luther looked back toward the bonfire.
Winston was on his feet now, pulling up his trousers.
“Sorry about the sloppy seconds, brother,” Winston said, taking the shotgun from Ben.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I plan on breaking new ground.”
“Excuse me?”
Ben pointed at Katie.
“Oh…all right then.”
“You son of a bitch!” Rufus cried. “She’s eight!”
Ben smiled. “That’s what I call a selling point.”
“I’ll kill you,” Rufus said.
Ben squatted down in front of Luther’s father. He cocked back his fist and swung down, hitting Rufus in the face with a blow that cracked bone.
Luther couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t just sit there and watch this happen for another second. Anything, maybe even death, would be better.
He crawled down the front side of the dune, the voices getting louder and clearer.
“Let me tell you what’s about to happen,” Ben said to Rufus. “This is your last hour of living. In that hour, you’re gonna watch me hurt your little girl. Hurt her so good. And you better watch every fucking second. And then—”
“Why?” Rufus screamed. “W
hat have we ever done to you?”
“Didn’t you hear what Winston told you? It’s fate. All your miserable lives you been racing toward this moment. Toward this awful end. And now it’s here.”
Rufus was hysterical, blubbering. “We’re a good family. We’re decent people. We’ve never hurt anyone. Why?”
Maxine lay unmoving in the sand, and as Luther crawled closer, he wondered if she was dead.
“‘Cause we like it, you stupid fuck,” Ben seethed.
Then he stood, pulled out his pocket knife, and flicked open the blade.
Luther crawling faster and faster through the sand.
Ben stared down at Katie.
“I don’t think I got your name, sweetheart.”
Katie squirming, trying to scoot away.
Rufus said, “I’ll do anything you want. Anything. Please don’t do this to my little girl.”
“I’m Ben,” Ben said to Katie, kneeling down beside her.
Luther was twenty feet away.
Ben grabbed Katie by the back of her shirt and dragged her toward him through the sand.
He rolled Katie over onto her back, her wrists bound, arms pinned underneath her.
She was crying, and Rufus begging, and Maxine still trapped in her horrified daze.
Luther stopped.
Ten feet behind Ben.
Hidden in shadow just outside the ring of illuminated sand.
As Ben cut into the side of Katie’s yellow swimsuit, the girl began to hyperventilate.
Luther telling himself to get up, run full speed at the man, claw his eyes, hit him, just do something to make this stop—
“Ben, you hear that?” Winston said.
Ben looked up and down the length of the beach.
It took him a moment, but Luther heard it too over the constant crush of the breakers—the low rumble of an engine.
In the distance, a pair of headlights appeared, and then another.
Winston walked over to Rufus and put the barrel of the shotgun against his throat.
“Where are the keys to the truck?”
“In the ignition.”
“Maybe they won’t even stop,” Ben said.
“Maybe they fucking will. Maybe there’s a half-dozen people coming to crash the beach party. We’ll never get off this island if word gets out.”
Ben closed his knife, slipped it into his pocket. Then he scooped Katie up and threw her over his shoulder.
“No!” Rufus screamed.
“What are you doing?” Winston asked.
“Taking a little something for the road.”
The twin growl of the approaching trucks was getting louder—fifty, maybe seventy-five yards away and closing fast.
“Kill ‘em,” Ben said, stumbling toward the truck.
He dropped Katie in the bed and climbed in behind the wheel.
“No,” Winston said. “If the trucks don’t stop, we’ll come back.”
Winston rushed around to the passenger-side door as the Dodge grumbled to life.
The tires slung a stream of sand and the Dodge whipped around and sped off into the darkness like a phantom—no headlights, no taillights.
Rufus screaming after his daughter.
The oncoming trucks roared past, one on each side of the bonfire, and in that half-second of firelit illumination, Luther saw the truck beds crowded with teenagers hollering and drunk, beer bottles raised to the sky.
A midnight race down the beach.
Luther got up and started toward the bonfire.
Rufus still screaming from the bottom of his soul, “My baby girl! My baby girl!”
Maxine was coming to her feet, and when she saw Luther, she said, “Darling! You’re alive!”
He ran into his mother’s arms and she held him tight for five seconds.
Shaking.
Sobbing.
Then Maxine went over to Rufus and tore at his knots until the rope came loose.
“We have to go,” she said. “They’ll come back.”
“We can’t leave,” he said, sitting up. “Not without Kate.”
“They were going to kill all of us, Rufus. They’ll finish the job if they come back and we’re here.”
“I’m not leaving my little girl!”
Maxine stared north up the beach, the noise of the trucks steadily dwindling away.
“I’m taking Luther, and we’re going to the sheriff’s house. Stay if you want.”
Rufus stared at his wife.
“Are you okay, Max?”
He reached out to touch her face but she swatted his hand away.
“What do you think?” She took Luther by the hand. “We have to run, boy.”
From the southernmost tip of the island, they could either bushwhack through the live oaks for a mile to the village of Ocracoke, or stay on the beach for two until it lead them to the access road that joined Highway 12.
They started jogging up the beach.
“We have to go faster,” Maxine said, panting.
“I can’t go any faster, Mama.” He was crying. “My feet hurt.”
Maxine stopped and collapsed in the sand.
“I’m tired too, Luther, but we have to reach the sheriff. Do you understand what will happen if those men get on the ferry tomorrow morning with Kate?”
He shook his head.
“We’ll never see her again.” She squatted down with her back to Luther. “Get on and hold on.”
Luther climbed onto his mother’s back, and she came to her feet and started jogging again.
The trucks had long since gone.
No sound but Maxine’s bare feet pounding at the tide-smoothed sand and the endless white noise of the sea.
Luther watched the breakers and the starry sky and the dunes scrolling slowly past.
He thought about his sister, tied up in the back of the truck.
He didn’t know how long his mother had been running when she finally collapsed.
Maxine hunched over on all fours and threw up in the sand.
Luther pulled her hair out of her face.
He patted her back.
“It’s okay, Mama,” he whispered.
In the weak starlight, he could see the black blood running down the inside of his mother’s thigh.
Another image to haunt his dreams for all time.
“Are you hurt, Mama?”
“I’ll be okay. Just climb back on.”
Luther snapped back into consciousness.
His arms were draped over his mother’s shoulders, and she stood in the middle of an empty, two-lane highway, bent over and trying to catch her breath.
“Luther, you awake?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to walk for awhile.”
He slid down her back and eased his shredded feet onto the pavement.
Felt like standing on a bed of razor blades.
“How much longer?” he asked.
“Just a half mile up the road to Dom’s place.”
“Is Katie okay, you think?”
“I don’t know, son.”
Maxine started jogging and Luther followed along down the double-yellow lines.
He couldn’t stop crying and every step left a bloody footprint in his wake, but they kept on, half-jogging, half-limping, until the first buildings of Ocracoke appeared in the distance.
The driveway leading to the home of Dominick James was a long, single lane framed by live oaks dripping with Spanish moss.
When she saw the saltbox in the distance, Maxine accelerated to a sprint, Luther calling out for her, begging not to be left, but she didn’t even look back once.
Luther came to a full stop and sat in the middle of the gravel road, watching the shadow of his mother running toward the house.