Long Way Home

by Tom Crown

  He glanced up the road and considered his options. He couldn’t let her face this man alone, no matter how well she thought she knew him, and he couldn’t very well leave her beside the road either.

  “What kind of party?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “A lot of people.”

  “A dozen?” That would be more people than he had seen in the last ten hours or so. He didn’t much enjoy crowds, but there could be safety in numbers.

  “More like a hundred.”

  “Okay.” He circled back to the driver’s side and got back inside.

  Jenny sank down beside him.

  “All right.” He started the engine.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For doing this.”

  “Yeah.”

  He followed her directions down the road, and after a couple of minutes turned onto a dirt road leading into the forest on their right. If it hadn’t been for the light sky above and the sight of reindeer lifting his spirits, he would’ve asked even more questions about the wisdom of what they were doing, but instead he kept driving, his heart pounding harder as their destination appeared up ahead.

  “Is this the place?”

  She nodded, peering into the distance at a lakeside camping site that was dotted with groups of people partying. Road-worn vehicles lined the open grass, European and Japanese mostly. The nearest one sported a Southern Cross Confederate flag in its rear window. That didn’t make much sense, here among all the spruce and the reindeer, but there it was.

  He pulled up next to a blue metallic Subaru and turned off the engine.

  “So?” He looked at Jenny. She kept gazing at the people outside, some standing by a small wooden house, others going into the lake. It didn’t seem like a place where one would find raving mad killers, but Jenny’s hand smoothing the bruises under her blouse again reminded him of how violence often had a tendency to lurk underneath the surface.

  “Stay here,” she said and grabbed the envelope from the center console. She opened her door and stepped out.

  “No, wait.” Ryan pushed his door open and set off after her.

  The sudden wave of smoke floating in the air brought him back to the mountains of Kandahar, the missile strike that had freed him, and the fire and fighting that had followed. He had to remind himself this wasn’t the time and place. He knew he shouldn’t bring that rage with him, not to this place, but as he headed after Jenny toward the crowd, with the gruesome images of the dead girl still flashing before his eyes, he felt his control rapidly slipping away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JENNY MARCHED ACROSS the grass toward Mats, who was talking to one of the Russians, Sergei or Dimitri, she couldn’t remember, but he kept glancing left and right, looking guilty of something, and he probably was. He had promised so many times to stay away from them, for his sake and for hers, but she had started to accept that he wouldn’t.

  He kept looking around as he spoke, but not for her. He hadn’t really looked for her in a long time.

  She kept going. Most of the people here were familiar, and she saw a few who might say ‘hello’, but her focus was fully on Mats and the people knew not to stop her. He had always been trouble, right from the start, right from junior high, and for years she’d foolishly seen that as part of his appeal. Thinking about that mistake now left her cold inside. It hadn’t taken very long for those hands of his to turn on her.

  She was right behind him. He still hadn’t seen her.

  “What’s this?” she asked as she continued forward, her voice strong and unwavering, surprising even herself.

  Mats turned.

  “What?” he said, smirking when he saw her, the mock innocence in his voice already annoying. He wanted to provoke her, and he certainly knew how.

  Jenny shoved the envelope at him, and he grabbed it with fumbling fingers.

  “This,” she said. “What’s this?”

  He peered at the envelope, genuinely confused, and she immediately realized she’d made a mistake. He hadn’t seen the photos, probably didn’t even know they existed, and what’s worse, in her anger she’d handed over the only copies she knew of. She reached out to take them back, but Mats easily sidestepped her with a teasing grin.

  “Take it easy,” he laughed. “Give me a minute, will you?”

  He only needed a second. The first photo drained all the color from his face. He stood still, frozen, as pale as she had ever seen him.

  “Where did you get these?” His voice was trembling, something she had only heard once before. He shoved the photo back into the envelope. “God damn it, Jenny!”

  “Don’t! Don’t put this on me. Who’s that girl?”

  “I have no idea!” He grabbed her hand and began to pull her away from the crowd.

  “I saw the pictures. I saw all of them!”

  “God damn it, Jenny!”

  He let go of her hand. She watched him twist and turn in frustration, and somehow his reaction gave her a sense of relief. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. Not a cold-blooded one, at least. But she still had to ask him. She still had to see the expression on his face when she did.

  “Did you do it?” she asked, as softly as she could utter such a thing. “Did you kill her?”

  “What?” He stopped moving. “No! No, I didn’t!”

  “What about them?” Jenny gestured toward a van across the field. She had seen him with those people more and more often, and it had worried her. She didn’t want their life to get that ugly. The Russians were out of his league. They were organized crime. Mats was just an angry, selfish moron. At least she had thought he was. Now she had learned he could keep secrets from her. Any kind of secret.

  Mats turned his head slowly and peered back at the Russians. He folded the envelope and put it inside his jacket, and with that simple motion suddenly seemed on top of everything once again.

  She’d seen him cover so many things up, but this was so far beyond cover-up that something snapped inside her. She drew her arm back and slapped him hard right across the face.

  Mats took a startled step away. “Fuck!” he yelled at her. “Are you crazy?”

  “Explain it to me!” She had to struggle to keep her voice from breaking.

  He took a step closer and glared down at her. “I’m in deep shit. All right? I’m in deep fucking shit. But what the hell is that to you? You’ll be out of here in the next test car with a big enough backseat for you!”

  “Oh, go to hell!” She backed away, reeling as if he had slapped her right back. It was no secret that he resented her working at the hotel, where she might find a way out and actually be able finally to leave him behind, even though he’d already left her a hundred times over.

  Mats made a dismissive gesture and turned to go. “Whatever gets you the fuck away from me!”

  “I want them back. The photos. I want them back!”

  “They’re mine, aren’t they?”

  “Not if you’re going to throw them away!”

  Mats smirked in reply and took a first step away from her. Jenny shoved him in the back. He stumbled forward but then caught his balance and stopped. She understood immediately she’d gone too far. What was she after anyway? She was fighting for something long gone, something that probably had never been there at all in the first place. Romance. Hope. A world that didn’t seem so grim. She was certainly looking in the wrong place.

  Mats turned and slapped her across the face. The heel of his palm connected hard to her cheekbone and twisted her head to the right. Dizzy and nauseous, she tumbled to the ground.

  Her skin stung where his fingers had landed and her knees hurt from the fall.

  “I told you to stay the fuck away from me!” he shouted. “I’ve told you to stay the fuck away!” He started to walk away again.

  Jenny leaped to her feet and launched a furious attack with her fists. She hit his back, his arms, but she didn’t have any power left in her anymore. She struggled to hold back her tears. Mats turned and
grabbed her.

  “Stay away from me,” he whispered through clenched jaws as he pulled her closer. She could see the muscles pulsating under his skin and stubble. “Stay away, and don’t ever mention these photos to anyone. Ever. I mean it.”

  She had never seen his eyes so dark, and she felt a wave of relief when he pushed her away and she fell back to the ground.

  But she needed the photos. She needed to know what had happened. She needed to know what kind of trouble Mats had brought into her world.

  She kicked out and hit his leg hard. He stumbled and fell.

  * * * *

  Ryan watched as Jenny struggled with a man who in all likelihood was Mats Jansson, the killer in the van, the one with the blood on his hands and the guilty expression on his face. Whatever plan Jenny had in mind seemed to have backfired.

  Ryan bolted back to the car, revved the engine, and steered it right up on the grass, sending the people in front of him screaming and scrambling to get out of the way.

  Second gear now. He focused on Jenny up ahead. Mats was leaning over her, holding her down.

  They were getting close fast.

  Ryan stepped on the brakes, threw the door open, and tumbled out.

  “Jenny!”

  Mats looked up in surprise just when Ryan found his footing and lunged right at him, walloping him with his body. Jenny sprung to her feet and bolted away. Ryan kept his focus on his opponent. They flew at each other at the same time, but Ryan felt himself slipping as he left the ground. Mats hit him hard, and a moment later Ryan landed on the grass with his attacker on top of him.

  Ryan pulled off to the side and felt Mats follow his move instantaneously. They wrestled, grasping mercilessly. It felt like an equal fight until someone else suddenly grabbed Ryan’s arms from behind. He realized several other men had emerged from the crowd, but before he even got a proper look at them, he took a hit across the face and collapsed. A kick lifted him toward the attackers behind him, his face hurting, his ears pounding, and it all made him think of Afghanistan again, everything he’d been through to get to this point in life. He expected a primordial rage to build inside, an urge to fight until the end, but his body wouldn’t move. He needed a second or two for the pain to subside, but a second or two wasn’t something these men were going to give him.

  To drive the point home, Mats punched his face again. The pain nearly made him black out. He felt the grass against his palms, felt himself swaying. A moment later, the man was straddling him, raising his fist to strike again.

  A gunshot rang out.

  “Mats!”

  Ryan looked up and saw the barrel of a hunting rifle. Jenny’s hands were waving the weapon and directing Mats off to the side. The other men had already merged back into the crowd.

  Mats just interlaced his fingers behind his head, arrest-style. “You’re not going to shoot me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Ryan listened to the silence that followed. Finally, Mats pushed himself up onto his knees.

  Ryan rolled to the side and got up. The people around them were staring, some taking futile cover behind bicycles and blankets, others frozen in fascination. What caught his eye, however, was the couple of men by a van along the forest line. One was imitating the handling of a rifle, then got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The other banged the side of the van with one hand and then opened the doors. He reached in and tossed a man out.

  Ryan raised a hand to block the low sunlight in his eyes and realized he was looking at a young woman hardly out of her teens huddling in the deep shadows in the back of the van. Dark hair, slim arms, torn dress. Their eyes met for a moment, a long, unexpected moment, but as he squinted to better read her expression the doors closed. The van lurched into motion and raced away, going much too fast on the uneven grass, suspensions slamming, bottoming out.

  “Ryan,” Jenny said, motioning with the rifle to get moving. It was a dangerous way to handle the weapon, so he quickly took a step to the right to get out of her line of fire.

  Mats made a move to get up as well, but Jenny pointed the rifle straight at him and shook her head. Mats grinned mockingly, but stayed down and, to his credit, remained silent.

  Ryan stumbled back to the car, the pain from the beating he’d just taken finally finding its way to his brain. He reached for the door on the driver’s side and leaned on it momentarily until Jenny nodded at him to keep moving. He pushed away from the door and sank down in the seat.

  Jenny circled back to the car. She kept the rifle pointed at Mats and took her time. Finally, she got inside.

  Ryan glanced at the rifle. “Be careful with that.”

  Jenny kept looking out the windshield. “We’d better go.”

  Mats’s friends were moving quickly toward them, gesturing between themselves as if conspiring to set an evil plan in motion.

  Ryan shifted into reverse and made a sharp turn with a hard yank of the wheel, sending the people running again. The car skidded wildly on the damp grass, and he lost control momentarily, his aching hands slipping off the wheel. He pressed the accelerator to the floor and roared across the final stretch of grass onto the road.

  Jenny just stared ahead, the rifle in her hands bouncing left and right as the car went right and left.

  He’d only been in her company for an hour, and he couldn’t help but wonder what it would take to survive a full day and night.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE CAR CAREENED with every bump and turn as the dirt road tested the suspension of the Volvo to its limits. Low-hanging trees were flashing by, leaves and branches slamming into the car’s windows, and Ryan sensed Jenny watching him with ever increasing trepidation.

  “I’m so sorry,” she finally blurted, her voice choked with guilt. “Mats, he’s pretty much the worst thing to ever happen in my life. He’s my boyfriend. I mean, he was. He used to be. He used to be a lot of things. At least, I thought he was.”

  “I figured,” Ryan said, glancing her way. “Some of that.”

  The car hit a pothole, and the impact pulled his attention back to the road. He took a deep breath and then caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. He recognized the mode. The wide eyes. The clenched jaw.

  He had run for his life before.

  With the sun moved low over the mountains, late afternoon was the only time of day when sunlight shone straight into his underground cell. He recognized the sound of the drone just before the missile hit and its explosion threw him against the cell door. He passed out for a moment, just for a second or two, and woke to the sound of people screaming outside. Black smoke was already welling in, stinging his nose, his throat, his eyes. He rolled on his side and coughed until he thought he’d throw up and see his lungs on the floor before him. The smoke was coming from outside, snaking its way in through the cellar window above him and billowing across the stone ceiling. But the bulk was welling in close to the ceiling, giving him a moment to analyze his situation.

  He was still sitting where he had landed, with his back against the door, and he quickly decided the other wall would be safer. He crawled across the floor in now thickening darkness, until he felt something cut deep into his thigh. His hand slipped on the warm blood. His blood. He hit the floor hard.

  The next thing he remembered was warm droplets of water landing on his face. He pulled away and felt the pain in his leg again. He then heard voices outside, half a dozen men, Pashtun and Arab, splashing water on the fire. The floor was wet around him, but the smoke had begun to clear. He saw his own blood on the floor, mixed with soot and sand, and also saw the shattered piece of wood that was still sticking out from his leg. He grabbed it, pulled it out, and held onto it tight, knowing it could be his rescue in this sea of blood and dust.

  He shook his head to clear the memories. He’d be working through those for a long time, no doubt, but right now he had enough to deal with here in front of him. The van that had left the camping site had appeared ahead, and the men he
knew were inside had looked like they could cause serious trouble. He didn’t know what their business was, but he could make some guesses, ranging from old-fashioned highway robbery to illegal gold mining or even space industry espionage. Lapland teemed with all sorts of activity these days, offering abundant opportunities to do good or bad, and from the way these men had looked on at the camping site, carefully studying the situation and the weapon, he rightly concluded they leaned heavily toward doing bad. And then there were the photos. A dead girl in the back of a van. And a live girl in the van in front of him.

  He moved into the left lane to overtake them and glanced over at Jenny. “You know these people?”

  She shook her head. “I try to stay as far away from them as I can.”

  So she did know them, more or less. And Mats did as well.

  Ryan stepped on the gas and took the car up alongside the van. He peered at the tinted window on the side, craning his neck to get a good view.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just having a look. I saw someone inside.”

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. Mats had been in those photos, and when Jenny had gone searching for him, she had found him at the camping site with another van holding another girl in the back of it. Or was it the same van?

  “Ryan!”

  A car had appeared in the oncoming lane, on a perfect collision course. Ryan moved his foot to hit the brakes, but the van immediately slowed, letting them pass in front of it.

  “You okay?” he asked, glancing again at Jenny. “I keep asking that, don’t I?”

  “Yes. No. I’m okay. I’m just embarrassed, that I dragged you into all of this.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Well, I am. What about you? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m all right. I’m starting to feel... Feel, I guess.” He touched his bruised face and immediately realized he shouldn’t have. Jenny looked down, guilt-ridden and ashamed.