“Could we actually fly out tonight?” Dee said.
“Assuming we find a plane with sufficient fuel, I’ll probably want to wait until first light. Really don’t want my first flight in over two decades to be by instrumentation.”
“Can I help fly?” Cole asked.
“Absolutely, copilot.”
Dee stared out the window at the open field they moved across, thinking how flying out of all this madness, of finally getting her kids someplace safe, felt so far beyond the realm of possibility she couldn’t even imagine it happening.
Ed slammed the brake.
She shot forward, painfully restrained by the seatbelt.
Looked up when she’d recoiled back into the leather seat, her first thought her children who were picking themselves up out of the backseat floorboards, and her second the numerous points of light that were moving toward the Jeep.
“Back up, Ed. Back up right—”
The windshield splintered and something warm sprayed the side of Dee’s face as Ed fell into the steering wheel, the horn blaring, other rounds piercing the glass, the night filling with gunshots. Dee unbuckled her seatbelt and shoved the gearshift into park and crawled over the console into the backseat. Sprawled herself on top of Naomi and Cole as bullets struck the car.
“Is he dead?” Naomi asked.
“Yes.”
The firing stopped.
“Either of you hit?”
“No.”
“Make it stop,” Cole cried.
“Are you hit, Cole?”
He shook his head.
Footsteps approached the Jeep, and in the illumination of an oncoming flashlight, Dee could see clear liquid sheeting down the glass of the rear passenger window.
“We have to get out of the car,” she whispered.
Already her eyes were burning, the fumes getting stronger.
“They’ll shoot us if we get out,” Naomi said.
“They’ll burn us alive if we stay in. They’ve shot some of the plastic gas cans on top of the Jeep.”
Dee opened the door and tumbled out. The glare of the flashlights maxed her retinas and she could see little of who was there nor determine their number amid the afterimages that pulsed purple in the dark.
“Stop right there.” A man’s voice. Dee stood and raised her hands.
“Please. I have two children with me. Naomi, Cole, get out.” She felt one of them, probably Cole, glom onto her right arm.
“They’re like me,” Cole said.
“What are you talking about?”
“They have light around their head. All of them.”
“Get back in your car,” the man said, close enough now for Dee to get a decent look—three-day beard, dark navy trousers and parka, aiming an automatic weapon at her face.
He motioned toward the car with the machinegun as others emerged out of the dark behind him.
Dee considered the Glock pushed down the back of her pants. Suicide.
“Bill, check the driver.”
A short, stocky soldier put a light through Ed’s window.
“Gone to be with the Lord, boss.”
“Got your Zippo on you, you chain-smoking motherfucker?”
“Yeah.”
“Particularly attached to it?”
“It was my older brother’s.”
“Cough that shit up.”
“Fuck, Max.”
The lightbeam glimmered off the steel as the soldier chucked his lighter to the man who held Dee and her children at gunpoint, Max catching it with his left hand, never letting the AR-15 waver in his right.
“What are you doing with them, little man?”
“Do not speak to my son.”
“Shut the f**k up.”
“What do you mean?” Cole asked.
“You know exactly what I mean. Don’t you want to come with us?”
“Why don’t you leave us alone? We aren’t doing anything to you.”
Max looked up at Dee with unfiltered hatred. “Get back in the car.”
“No.”
“Get in the car or I’ll shoot you and your children in the knees and put you in there myself. You can roast healthy or you can roast with shattered kneecaps. It makes not a f**king bit of difference to me so long as I get to watch you burn.”
Dee said, “What did we ever. . .”
Max aimed the AR-15 at her left knee.
Split second choice. Reach for the Glock or speak one last time to your children.
“I love you, Naomi. I love you, Cole. No one and nothing can take that away.”
“I can,” Max said.
She drew her kids into her, Naomi quaking and crying, but she didn’t allow herself to avert her eyes from the man who was going to murder them. She stared Max down, wondering would he think of them years from now on his deathbed in a moment of clarity and regret, wondering if her eyes would always haunt him, but she doubted it as he returned the stare, a malevolent smile curling his lips, Dee’s heart in her throat.
The slug mostly decapitated Bill.
A shotgun thundered out of the woods, Max spinning toward the gunfire, several of his men falling, flashlights hitting the ground, muzzleflames spitting out of the machineguns. Dee jerked Naomi and Cole to the ground and dragged them crawling away from the Jeep toward the other side of the road, where they rolled into a ditch.
Smell of moist, rich earth. The gunfire intensifying, bullets striking the trees behind them, Dee pushing Naomi’s and Cole’s heads down, pulling Cole into her chest and speaking into his ear over the shattering noise of the firefight, “I’m right here, I’ve got you.” She couldn’t hear him crying but she could feel his body shaking.
After what seemed ages, the flurry of gunfire dissipated.
They lay in the dark, Dee staring into a wall of dirt.
Someone yelled, “Fall back.”
Footsteps crunched through the leaves—someone retreating into the woods.
A man groaned nearby, begging for help.
Three reports from a handgun.
An AR-15 answered.
The exchange went on for several minutes, and it struck Dee that the gunfire sounded like the communication of terrible birds. She was tempted to climb out of the ditch and have a look, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.
After a while, the shooting stopped altogether.
Footfalls echoed through the forest.
The man nearby pleaded to God.
Someone said, “Jim, right there.”
A machinegun ripped up the silence.
Four shotgun blasts roared back.
Footsteps moved closer to the ditch.
“Sure we got all of them?”
A woman answered, “Yeah, there were nine. I count one, two, three, four, five six. . .” She laughed. “Where do you think you’re going?” A single handgun report rang out. “And this one’s still hanging in there, too.”