by Sasha Goldie
It was so dark I nearly couldn't see the hand in front of my face, much less the next tree trunk.
"I know you're there," John said. He was much closer than I would've expected. Or he was throwing his voice really well.
How the hell had he even found my uncle's friend's cabin, anyway? I didn't even remember it at first.
Looking behind, I saw a light bobbing far back in the distance. He was on the path, all right, but he was a ways back. Unfortunately, he was able to move much faster down it than I could, since he had a light.
Turning away from the light, I fumbled forward, hands out in front of me, going as fast as I could and trying not to fall.
"I see your footprints," John yelled into the woods. His voice sounded farther away this time. I was making some headway.
The forest lightened suddenly, the moon breaking through some of the trees. I could make out the edges of the path. As soon as I had that visibility, I took off at a sprint, my breath coming in quick bursts.
I had to be running on pure adrenaline by now. I didn't have any other explanation for why my legs hadn't given out. Saying a thankful prayer I hadn’t had a seizure, I continued on.
The lake came into view, the end of the path in sight. I nearly wept when I saw the water and careened out onto a sandy beach that opened up onto the water.
Looking left and right, my relief turned to frustration. I'd remembered the distance around the lake incorrectly. It was far bigger than I remembered, and the nearest house looked like it was miles away.
I didn't have any other choice but to run. I took off toward the cabin positioned at the water, but I couldn't stay visible. I veered left, back toward the trees, and ran in their shadow, looking back every few feet until I saw John stumble out of the trees.
I stopped and pressed my hand over my mouth, backing up slowly into the woods until I could hide behind a tree. He used the moonlight and his flashlight to scan the ground until he found my tracks, then turned my way. I was still a good way away from him. If I could move from tree to tree, I might be able to make it to the cabin.
The dark cabin.
What if nobody was there? How would I get in?
I had to try. At least I could see. The moon was nearly full and high in the sky, shining down on the water. Keeping on the inside of the tree line, I tiptoed from tree to tree, trying to stay on the pine needles and away from the branches. The fallen leaves were still soft and helped deaden the sounds of me moving. I had to stop a couple of times and maneuver my way through branches. Making noise would undo any speed I'd managed to gain.
Finally, I made it close to the cabin, waited until John had his head down, looking for more footprints, then darted forward, stopping behind a thick oak close to the house. Peeking carefully around it, I saw him looking closely, trying to figure out if I was in the woods, or had made it farther than he thought.
Darting forward again, I breathed a sigh of relief when I was safely hidden from view by the home.
"Tricky, tricky, Tyler." John's voice carried to me, around the house. "Are you in the woods or the house?"
I moved toward the door, ringing the doorbell frantically. I heard the chimes, but prayed John was still far enough away that he couldn't.
Nobody came to the door, and as I peered inside, I saw the furniture all covered up with white sheets. Damn it. They were gone for the season. This was someone's summer home.
I looked around for options. No cars in the driveway. There was a planter, empty of plants, but if I was lucky, they'd hidden a key under it.
No luck. I had to get inside, look for a phone.
I slipped one of the rags off my feet. It was soaking wet and looked bloody in the moonlight. No way I was chancing a glance at my feet yet. They’d likely make me faint. I held the rag on the pane of glass closest to the handle of the door, thanking the homeowners for having the type of door that looked like an old-fashioned window. I could break one small pane of glass without having to shatter an enormous glass door.
I hit it with the planter, but it only cracked it. I hadn’t done it hard enough. The sound had been so loud, surely John heard it, though. I had to move fast. Hitting it again, harder, the glass shattered and fell out onto the ground. I reached around and unlocked the bolt, opening the door quickly and stepping over the broken glass.
Pushing the door shut and bolting it again, I crouched down and ran for the kitchen. Everyone had a phone in their kitchen. Stumbling forward through the dark hallway, I was thankful to see the moon was positioned to bathe the kitchen in light. It had big windows instead of a back wall, giving maximum light to an otherwise pitch-black house.
And these wonderful people were no exception about their phone. I picked up the receiver, but there was no dial tone.
They'd turned it off for the winter. No. What would I do now? If there was no phone, there was probably no power, no internet. No way to signal where I was. John would come look in the house eventually.
"Tyler?" his voice came through the door, sing-song. I ducked behind the kitchen island and began opening drawers.
Jackpot. I found the knife drawer.
And an ice pick.
I grabbed a large knife with one hand, and the ice pick with the other. He probably had his gun, but at least I'd leave lots of DNA evidence in the house if I could get him to bleed, too.
Crouched behind the island, I turned and looked for somewhere to hide. There was a pantry. Rising, I scurried over to it and ducked in, closing the door behind me.
Fuck. I should've left it open. At least then, I could see if he was coming or not. I put both the knife and the ice pick in my left hand, and leaned against the door, pressing my ear to it. My eyes darted around, trying to see something, but of course, the pantry was so dark I wouldn’t have been able to see my hand in front of my face.
"Tyler?" John's voice was muffled. I could barely hear him through the thick, wooden door. Damn rich people and their quality woods.
I heard his footsteps, though, when he stepped on to the kitchen tiles. He was wearing boots, heavy boots.
The steps came closer. "Phone's dead, Tyler. Nowhere for you to go."
I froze, clutching the knife to my chest, not breathing. As the footsteps neared the pantry, I backed up as far as I could, but that wasn't very far. Just a couple of feet before my back pressed into a shelf or something.
John threw the door open and reached in, shouting. "Gotcha, Tyler!" He grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me toward him. He blocked the moonlight from the kitchen, so I still couldn’t see anything except his shadowy outline. The flashlight in his hand didn’t help, temporarily blinding me as he tried to grab me.
I flailed, terrified, trying to pull back.
The knife and ice pick sank into the meaty space under his arm, partway into his armpit area.
I gasped and jerked back, and he did the same, stepping back so the light bathed him. Both of us moving at the same time caused the knife to cut him more as I pulled it out of his body.
He stared at his armpit as blood soaked through his thin tee shirt. It didn't take but a matter of seconds for it to drip onto the floor. "What did you do?" he asked as he staggered backward, dropping the flashlight.
"I don't know," I cried. "I didn't do it, you fell on my knife."
He looked from his arm to me, his face awash in incredulity. “Seriously? I fell on your knife?”
Tightening my grip on the temporary weapons, I inched out of the pantry. “I’ll get something. Maybe we can tie it off and stop the bleeding.” I grabbed his flashlight, then turned and wobbled toward the living room. Why I was bothering to try to save a man that had run me over and desperately wanted to kill me was a question for another day.
I snatched a sheet off of the covered furniture in the living room and ran back to find John splayed out in the middle of the kitchen floor.
"John?" I asked quietly.
He rolled his head toward me, gasping. I lurched toward him, setting the weap
ons just out of his reach. Just in case. Staying as far away as I could, I got to my knees and tried to help. I didn't have a clue what I should do with the sheet. First, I had to find the wound, then try to tie something above it, I was pretty sure.
John moaned, making me jump, my hands shaking. I reached for his shirt, to pull it up, when he let out a long breath and just… died. I leaned forward, keeping my body as far away as I could as I reached out to feel his throat for a pulse.
Dead.
I scrambled backward, sobbing, and rolled over onto my hands and knees. Picking up speed, I made it into the living room. Grabbing another sheet off of the furniture, I wrapped it around myself and curled up in the corner. Tears leaked from the corner of my eyes as I wrapped my arms around my legs and covered my head with the sheet.
My adrenaline left me, and I felt like a popped balloon. All the pain from the night set in. My feet felt like they'd been put through a meat grinder.
The sobs returned, and I slid over onto my side, still wrapped up. All I could think about was the feel and sound of the knife sliding into John’s body. “Patrick,” I whispered. “Please come take care of me now.”
I stayed there, crying, begging Patrick to psychically connect to me and find me, until I heard the sirens. My mind jumbled with fuzzy thoughts. Corey would have gotten to the road by now. Maybe he'd send help. Someone would come soon. John was dead. It was over.
26
Patrick
Brady's leg kept bumping into mine. It shouldn't have irritated me. It shouldn't have bothered me. But if he didn't stop jiggling and wiggling his legs beside me on the desk, I was going to take him to Corey in pieces when they found him.
"Calm down," I whispered for the fifth time. "You're making me more nervous."
We sat on a bench outside the shop, watching the first signs of light hit the horizon. In a matter of minutes, we'd be ready to go out.
The crowd in front of us had assembled quickly, surprisingly fast. People I'd never seen before had come to look for Tyler and Corey, and I'd lived here all my damn life. Too bad my parents had been standoffish. I could've had more friends growing up.
Well, I'd change that now. As soon as I got Tyler back.
"We're going to kill John, right?" I whispered.
Brady looked at me out of the corner of his eye. "You can't say stuff like that to me. I'm still a cop."
"Yeah, but if the opportunity presents itself."
He didn't answer. I took it as a yes.
Dawn wasn’t far off, but the bright moon still lit up the night. We paced, waiting for any news, or for the dawn so we could go search. Finally, when I felt like I was going to have a panic attack, the phone rang.
Brady and I looked at each other, and by the expression on his face, he was as terrified as I was. A phone call could mean extremely bad news.
"Patrick!" Agent Morris yelled at me from inside the garage.
Oh, yeah. I was supposed to be in there answering all phone calls, in case they were ransom demands from John.
Morris held the handset out to me to grab as I ran in. "Hello?" I asked, breathless. "Tyler?"
"Hey, Patrick, it's Martha, can I speak to Brady?" I knew her from the diner. She pretty much ran the police station.
"Yeah, one sec."
I handed the phone to Brady. "Martha."
Agent Morris let out a breath and rolled his eyes. "Hurry."
"Hey, Martha, what's going on?" Brady listened a second, then cut his eyes at me. "Get an ambulance out there. I'll send a car from here. If fire and rescue is closer, send them, too. It's got to be them."
He slammed the phone into the receiver. "Johnson!"
Two state troopers had stayed when the FBI showed up, to be of assistance if needed. "I need a ride out to the lake."
He turned and jogged out the bay door toward his truck. "Come on, Patrick, you need to go with us."
"Now, hold on just a minute." Agent Morris's voice thundered over the parking lot, and the rescue crowd turned as one from Brady to Morris, eyebrows raised. They didn't take to someone talking to the town's favorite officer that way.
"Sorry, Morris, I got excited. That was Martha. She got a call from a security company in Bend. A house alarm was activated on a lake home that should be locked up tight for the winter."
My heart leaped. Maybe it was Tyler. "Don't we need, like, a SWAT team to go or something?"
He smiled. "No, she said they have a video feed, and the description is clearly Tyler, curled up in the living room, in the corner. They watched him kill someone in the kitchen."
"No." Poor Tyler. If he killed John, even in self-defense, it would haunt him for the rest of his life. "We've got to get to him."
"I'm coming, too," Ann said. "My son needs me."
She'd have to race me to get to him first, but I didn't say that. "Come on, there won't be room in the cruiser. I'll drive too." I turned to the crowd. "Excuse us, we need to get out of here, fast." They parted, hurrying out of the way.
"What about Corey?" I asked. The sound of the phone ringing again drifted out the bay doors, making the entire collected crowd turn and look at the building in fear. Now what? I ran in to answer again.
"Hello?"
"Patrick, Martha again. As soon as I hung up, 911 got a call from a payphone at that little gas station up on Rocky Branch." I put my hand on the mouthpiece and repeated her words to the crowd, all of which had crammed themselves in the garage to be able to hear. I paused to listen to her, then kept repeating her words. "It was Corey. He told a hell of a story, but it sounds like Tyler and John both did head toward the lake, through the woods. The break-in and video from the security company is almost surely Tyler killing John."
"I'm going for Corey." The crowd moved out of the way so Brady could go out. He waved his hand at them as the statie turned on his cruiser. "Thank you all for coming. Please stay by your phones in the extremely unlikely chance this is some sort of false alarm. We'll alert everyone to stand down if we have the situation under control. I'll make sure Martha activates the phone chain either way. For an update, or to ask you to come back out."
Brady slid into the passenger seat, and I turned to find Carson holding out my keys. He'd returned from his errand to take Harry to the vet while Brady had assembled the search party. "I'll drive. You probably shouldn't in this condition."
I nodded and ran around to the passenger seat while Tyler's parents got in the back. "Stay close to them," I urged Carson as we pulled out behind Morris's unmarked sedan. He drove well, fast enough to stay on the two cars as they careened up the mountain, sirens wailing.
"Should they do that? What if they're wrong and it's Corey that's dead, and the sirens just tell John to hide?"
"I guess they're pretty sure it was John if they're going in like this," he mused. We watched the state trooper patrol car veer off onto a different road. They were headed to pick up Corey.
I'd been up to the lake many times, as my parents also owned a home up here. My dad loved that we could feel like we were on vacation, but he still went to work all week.
Having a vacation home thirty minutes from our real home wasn't much excitement to me, but now I understood it much better.
For every mile that sped under our tires, I tried to calculate the time and distance remaining based on the many trips I'd made to the lake before.
Finally, we turned onto the road that circled half the lake and served as a driveway for the handful of houses up here.
Carson pulled past the ambulance, giving them room to get out if they needed to. I had my door open and ran around the back of the car before he even put it in park.
Following Morris into the brightly lit house, I urged him to hurry under my breath. Glass crunched under my feet in the doorway. I looked down, but didn't give it much thought.
Morris went left, so I followed in time to see a paramedic zipping a man into a body bag. I got a glimpse of his face, and it most definitely wasn't Corey or Tyler.
&n
bsp; The pressure on my heart lifted, a little. It wouldn't go away until I had Tyler in my arms.
Whirling around, I looked down the long hall and saw a couch. Martha had told Brady that Tyler was curled up in the living room. I moved that way, holding my breath. I had no idea what condition he'd be in.
Paramedics blocked my view. "Tyler?" I whispered, praying it was him and he was okay.
"Get a stretcher in here," one of the uniformed men called out. He waved me over when he saw me. "Who are you?"
"Patrick," I said weakly. "I'm a CNA if you need any help."
Tyler's voice rang out. "Patrick?"
My relief nearly took me to my knees. "Oh, thank goodness," I said as I rushed forward, squeezing around the EMTs and dropping to my knees.
Tyler had a sheet wrapped around him, and he was in the corner, backed up and defensive. "What are you doing?" I asked as I crawled forward, eyeing his face. It was covered in small cuts, and his hair was tangled and dirty. Leaves and a few small twigs stuck out. Where the hell had John held him?
Ann's voice came from the entry. "Where is my son?"
Tyler cut his eyes from me to some point over my head. "Don't let her come in here."
I pointed at the paramedic positioned farthest back. He was likely the newbie, or least trained since he wasn't taking point. "Go stop her. Now."
If Tyler didn't want her to see him like this, then we'd get him taken care of first. "Did he hurt you?" I held my hands out.
"He won't let us touch him." The paramedic closest to Tyler had his kit beside him and was clearly upset, concerned about Tyler's state.
"Well, from the looks of it, he just killed someone, so he's probably a little messed up right now. Scoot over."
I moved closer to Tyler, and he nodded his head.
"Can I come closer?" I asked.
"Please." His face was filled with desperation and despair. I moved quickly then, wrapping my arms around him.