“Take his legs,” Vic smiled as Blake joined him on the ground, his eyes noticing the rifle the man wore across his back immediately. Blake was an interesting man and Vic was uncertain just exactly what he thought of him so far. He definitely wasn’t a hindrance in any way and Vic believed that Blake would eventually become an asset—hence why he’d allowed the man to stick around. But there was something about Blake that he had yet to figure out. Something that puzzled him and something that Vic believed—when he figured it out—would shed a lot of light on who the man really was.
“Let’s just move him into this alley and dump him,” Vic continued, feeling little compassion for the dead man whose hands he held in his own.
As Blake looked down at Jenson’s body, his feelings were somewhat different. He felt sorry that a life had been taken, but he didn’t feel any of the guilt or remorse that he had expected. Jenson had been a threat to them and they—or rather, Vic—had done what was needed to eliminate that threat. He picked up the man’s legs with ease and shuffled over to the alley that Vic had nodded to. With little regret, the two of them dumped his body in among a pile of trash bags, throwing a couple over his body to disguise it from any unsuspecting passersby.
“Good work, my friend,” Vic smiled at Blake, impressed by how little resistance or complaining he had been met with. Moving a dead body wasn’t an everyday sort of task, but Blake had handled it like it was, barely even batting an eyelid during the whole fiasco. “Let’s get back inside.”
They scaled the fire escape and were back in the apartment in a matter of minutes, Vic pulling the door to it closed while Blake removed the rifle from his shoulder and placed it on the kitchen counter. Both men stopped and looked at each other for a moment, weighing the other one up against their expectations and trying to figure out exactly what kind of man they had paired up with. Neither of them knew for sure, but perhaps unsurprisingly, as they looked at each other, both Blake and Vic knew they felt safer than they would’ve if they were alone. In the most unlikely of situations, in perhaps the most unlikely of places, they both appeared to have found a friend that they could truly rely on.
“Now what?” Blake asked as he tore his gaze away from Vic and looked around the apartment once more. “Do you think we should stay here, or go back down to the store?”
“I’m heading back down to my store, my friend,” Vic answered plainly. “Do you still want to join me?”
Looking back at Vic once more, Blake pondered the question. The apartment was nice and homey, much better equipped than his own apartment would’ve been. This was his chance to potentially avoid all the madness that came with Vic; the guns and the hoard of illegal supplies that lined the walls of his store down below. He could walk out of the front door and go back to his own life, forgetting everything that had just happened.
Or could he? A dead man lay hidden in the street below and for the first time in Blake’s life, he felt like he was excited about what was to come. He was terrified, of course. But he felt like now was the time to take a chance and to take a risk. He lived his life acting like a fearless warrior on the screen and pretending to be someone he was not. Maybe now, with Vic by his side, Blake could become the man he’d always wanted to be. The man he’d always pretended to be.
Vic stared at Blake with emotionless eyes as the stuntman made his decision, waiting silently to discover what it would be. Inside he knew the answer though. There was a twinkle in Blake’s eyes that told Vic he was ready for adventure. The setting for it all might not be the most romantic or the most straightforward, but the volcanic eruption had given Blake a chance to do something that Vic suspected he never thought he’d get for real.
“I do,” Blake finally replied, picking the rifle up from the kitchen counter and walking toward Vic. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 15
Sitting on the flat roof above his porch, Michael could just make out Mia’s group walking away into the distance through the murky sky that surrounded his home. He wore a scarf over his mouth and nose like Mia had instructed, but as he could literally see the bits of ash and debris floating in the air, he wondered whether it would be enough.
Knitting his fingers together, Michael held his hands behind his head and watched them go, thinking about whether he’d made the right decision. Introducing Mia to his mother earlier that morning had been a mistake; he realized that now. It had done nothing except get the two women fired up and now his mother was almost beside herself with anger that neither he nor Angelica had left the village. She didn’t understand why they were staying behind for her, especially when she had told them countless times to go.
It had undoubtedly been the hardest decision of Michael’s life. He knew that if he made it to Portland, he had a chance of seeing his children again. If he stayed at home, that chance was dead—as he eventually would be. But as much as he loved his children, more than he had ever thought possible, he couldn’t bring himself to abandon his mother.
Michael had only been four years old when his father died. Despite his age, he remembered it like it was yesterday. Every tiny little detail was ingrained in his mind forever; all he had to do was close his eyes and he was there again. It had happened in the very house he sat above now. In the one room he saw every day, the one place he couldn’t avoid. His mom had been out somewhere when Michael returned from school, so no one else was around. That meant he had been the one to find his father hanging from the light fixture.
Even after all these years, Michael had never asked his mother why his father killed himself. There had been a note on the floor under his father’s body, but it wasn’t one that Michael had ever read. All he knew was how it had affected his mother. She’d tried to take her own life no more than six months later, something that Michael hadn’t been aware of until much later in his own life. In fact, something that he hadn’t been aware of until he was twelve years old, when he found his mother passed out in a pool of her own vomit and learned that she had tried to take her own life on many other occasions too.
That was just after Angelica’s father had left them. He was only in Michael’s life for a short period of time, making his first official appearance just before Michael’s ninth birthday. His mom had been pregnant with Angelica only a matter of weeks later and very quickly their family of two became a family of four.
Again, Michael never asked his mom why Angie’s dad walked out on them all. One day he was there when they had breakfast and then when Michael and Angelica came home that evening, he was gone. Angie was only four years old, just like Michael had been when he lost his father. Albeit in a very different manner. Despite that though, the pain was still the same. Everyone still felt abandoned and everyone still felt pain. None more so than Michael’s mother.
All Michael had to do was close his eyes and he could hear his mother crying. The walls in their house were thin and it was a sound that had kept him awake at night through most of his childhood. He remembered holding Angie in the weeks after her father had left and letting her cry on his shoulder, because their mother was too stricken by grief to look after her. It wasn’t something that Michael held against his mother, instead more something that he resented Angelica’s father for. No woman deserved to go through that much pain.
Throughout it all, Michael had seen himself as his mother’s protector. Even when he grew up and opportunities arose for him to leave his home behind and move on, he turned them down. Without a real male role model of his own, Michael had fashioned himself into what he believed a man should be. He put his mother’s needs before any of his own, because she had never been lucky enough to find a man who would do that for her. Throughout everything, Michael was determined to be that man.
Life had been hardest when he’d met Sara and very quickly—and accidentally—got her pregnant. Doing what he thought a true man should do, Michael proposed and married her, encouraging Sara to move into the village with him. Deep down he’d known she hadn’t liked it there from the start, but in hi
s attempt to be a real man and a good husband, Michael had forced himself to overlook those details.
Their relationship had been a whirlwind romance. Sara’s flight out of Helena Regional Airport had been catastrophically delayed and Michael—working the night shift that Thursday—had stayed up all night talking to her. Very quickly they had fallen for each other, and even though Sara lived several hundred miles away, she uprooted her life and sacrificed her future for Michael. He understood that now, but at the time, Michael hadn’t been able to see what was right in front of him.
He was blinded by the desire to be a real man and so everything with Sara had snowballed so quickly. It didn’t take more than a year of marriage for Michael to realize that he didn’t truly love Sara, but by that point it was too late. Logan had been born and after what he had experienced with his own father and with Angelica’s, Michael refused to be the type of man who abandoned his family. A few years later, he and Sara had even had another child, Lucie, in an attempt to save their marriage. That was the point when Michael finally saw sense and realized what he was doing. He wasn’t being a good man by trying to make the marriage work—it was over, and a true man would be humble enough to accept that.
So eventually, Sara, Logan, and Lucie had left, moving on with their lives and leaving Michael behind. He and Sara had parted on good terms, his intentions always good, just the execution of his actions lacking in thought. He only wanted the best for his family and it took Michael some time, but he finally realized that the way he was acting was not it.
It had taken some time—and an immense amount of self-loathing—but finally he had reached that conclusion. For all the ways that having a wife and children had made Michael a better man though, it had left him completely hung up on his abandonment issues. That was where it all stemmed from. He had watched his mother be abandoned twice and he had later been forced to abandon his own children. Now that he was faced with the option of leaving his village to save his own life or staying behind and living out his final few days by his mother’s side, there wasn’t really a choice for him. Michael would never abandon his mother—even if she didn’t see it that way. He was finally being the man that he had always tried to be and no one could change his mind.
“Mike?”
Angelica’s voice silenced Michael’s thoughts, his half-sister exiting the house and looking upwards. She knew that he liked to sit on top of the porch to think; it was unsurprising that was where she found him now.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Michael replied. “You?”
Angelica nodded. She wanted to say something to Michael, to thank him for not leaving them behind and going with Mia and Jorge, but she couldn’t find the words. She had known she would never leave the village—no matter how much confidence she acted with when she was working in the airport, Angelica was deathly afraid of what lay beyond their valley and had no intention of ever finding out. Even if that condemned her to death. With Michael, she hadn’t been so sure. He had children out there that he could’ve gone to. She didn’t need to know why. Angelica was just happy that she still had her brother with her.
“Yeah,” she finally replied. “Help me up?”
Reaching down, Michael offered his hand to Angelica, gently pulling her body so she was able to scramble up the wall and sit beside him. Mia’s group was still just visible in the distance, the eleven of them hiking up one of the larger hills in an attempt to reach high ground. Once they were at the summit they would be out of view and it would be like they had never visited the small village at all.
“Who went with them?” Michael asked, uncertain which of the people he had grown up with had moved on. From the size of the group in the distance he knew it couldn’t have been many, but he was still curious who he would never see again.
“Stuart, Deb, Billy, Ethan, and Miles,” Angelica replied, remembering the names she had been told earlier.
“Huh,” Michael shrugged. “I thought Tom and Brady would go with them too.” For everything that Michael loved about the village where he lived, there were five things that he hated. He would’ve moved away years ago if it wasn’t for his mother and the horrible cancer that had claimed her body and rendered her legs useless, relegating her to a bed for the remainder of her life.
It was the people who lived there that he really struggled to see eye to eye with. He had always sort of felt like he didn’t belong and discovering how few people had chosen to leave only made him feel more certain of that. His reasoning for condemning himself to death had been valiant—he thought. He was sure all the other people were refusing to leave more out of stubbornness than anything else.
“Do you wish you could’ve gone?” Angelica asked in a small voice, unable to look at her brother as she posed the question.
Michael was shocked. He thought out of everyone, Angie understood his intentions. He had never felt like he needed to explain himself to her. “I do,” he answered honestly, “but that wasn’t the right choice for me. I’m needed here and I would never leave you or Mom behind.”
Angelica nodded. She had just wanted to hear her brother say it. Sliding her hand across the small gap between where the two of them sat, she brushed her fingers against his until they were holding hands.
“What do you think will happen to us?” Angelica asked again, her voice still barely above a whisper. “Do you think we’ll die?”
“Probably,” Michael replied, squeezing his sister’s hand as he spoke, the two of them huddled up against the terrors of the eruption. “But everyone dies eventually, Angie. Sooner or later, each of our times would have come.”
“Do you think it’ll hurt?”
“I don’t know,” Michael pondered, trying to imagine what it would be like to die. “I hope it’s just like going to sleep. You close your eyes and for once, you just don’t wake up. I know it can be painful. Really painful. But,” Michael remembered the sight of his father’s limp body in front of him and the years of sorrow it had brought his mother afterwards. “I think it’s more painful for the people around you. For the ones who have to watch you die and deal with it afterwards.
“I think that’s why I’m still here, Angie,” Michael continued after a short pause. “I think it’d be more painful to leave and know that you and Mom died here and I did nothing to try and make life easier for you, than it will be to leave this world with you both by my side. When the end comes—and sadly, I think it will come soon—I want to be with the people I love, not some strangers who claim they can save me. I don’t know how things would have ended up if I’d gone with them, but I do know that by staying here I get to spend my final days with two of the people I love the most in the world. My death will be on my own terms and nothing that anyone says or does can change that. I will die the man that I always wanted to be.”
Chapter 16
She had to time this perfectly. Riley lay in bed in the back bedroom, the sun just rising outside and trying as hard as it possibly could to break through the dark clouds that surrounded the farmhouse. A pointless task, as the world was now eternally doomed to a never-ending twilight, but it marked the fact that morning had come and that meant it was time for Riley to put her plan into action.
Down the hall, Chase was lacing up his boots and preparing for the day ahead. He’d gone over everything meticulously with his grandfather the day before. They’d run through what to do if he encountered someone on the side of the road, what to do if he ran into trouble, if the truck broke down, if he couldn’t find the supplies they needed—all eventualities had been covered and now there was nothing left to do but leave.
Chase couldn’t help feeling a bit bad for Riley though. He understood why she wanted to come with him and internally he had finally come to the decision that he would prefer it if Riley was by his side. That didn’t matter though. Grandma Linda was dead set against the idea and so Riley was staying put. His sister had tried to argue once more over dinner late last night but it had just ended in a shouting
match between the two of them. In the end, Riley had abandoned her dinner and flounced off to her room, slamming the door behind her.
But now that he was finally ready, Chase knew he couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to her. Even if he was planning on being back later that same day, he still needed to say his goodbyes to his sister.
“Hey,” Chase knocked softly on her door, the wooden structure opening slightly as he did so. “Riley? You up?”
“Go away,” Riley grumbled from her bed, locking eyes with her brother as he entered the room.
“Hey,” Chase complained. “You know this isn’t my decision. I’m not the one making you stay behind.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t actually ever tell Grandma that you wanted me to come with you,” Riley pouted. This was the first part of her plan and it needed to be acted out perfectly.
“That’s not fair,” Chase replied as he sat on the edge of Riley’s bed. “You know that I couldn’t have changed her mind. It would’ve made no difference.”
“It would’ve to me,” Riley replied truthfully, still slightly hurt that her brother hadn’t fought in her corner.
“I’m sorry,” Chase admitted, bowing his head in apology. “I’m gonna miss you today, you know I will.”
Riley didn’t say anything, determined to stick to her “grumpy child” persona and not give in to her brother’s nice words. She needed him to think that she was angry with him and to tell their grandparents as much. If she was going to make it out of the farmhouse, she needed Chase to think that she hated him.
“I’ll see you when I get back, yeah?” Chase continued, trying to clear the air between him and his sister. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Whatever,” Riley huffed. “Just go.”
“Riley, please...”
“Just go, Chase!” Riley raised her voice at her brother, rolling over in her bed and putting her back to him. “I don’t even care if you don’t come back.”
Escaping Darkness (Book 2): The Cloud Page 11