by Scott Baker
Room five.
‘Go towards them?’ Lauren breathed.
Room six.
‘We’ll wait till they go into a room and then …’ He looked out, playing it out in his mind. Their SUV was fifty feet away. They would never make it. They did not have time.
‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ he cursed. Then he saw it. Right there, blazing with its flashing red lights. They would never make their own car – the men in black had just gone into room seven – but the ambulance was only fifteen feet away.
‘Okay, we have to time this right,’ he said as he reached up for the door handle. Just then they heard another groan from the bed.
Shaun spun around. He had completely forgotten about the hobo. He paused, uncertain.
‘Shaun, we can’t. You can’t carry him.’
He knew she was right, but … ‘They’re gonna kill him if we leave him.’ Shit, shit, shit.
You run now you might just make it to the van, but you leave a man to certain death. You try and take him and you might all die.
Shit.
What kind of man are you?
Stupid brain.
Shaun half-crawled, half-scrambled across the floor over to the man on the bed. He had rolled over slightly, but had not woken up.
‘Lauren, when I say so, open that door fast.’ He heaved the man up onto his shoulders. ‘I’m going to race for the dumpster. The second I’m through the door, you follow right behind me, you got that? Right behind me. If they see me, I don’t want you stranded in here.’
Lauren nodded. She was already exhausted after the accident and did not have any more energy for fear.
‘Now!’ Shaun rasped.
Lauren opened the door and followed Shaun as he raced for the dumpster. The area of exposed ground between the room and the cover offered by the large metal trash unit was about ten feet, but it felt like a marathon. Shaun’s thighs burned as his shuffling steps rang loud in his ears. After the longest second of his life, he slid to a crouched halt behind the dumpster. Lauren landed beside him, breathing quickly.
They waited.
She peeked around the edge of the dumpster and saw the black-clad men enter room nine. No one there. They emerged. Room ten.
They hadn’t seen them. God, they hadn’t seen them! Shuffling on his knees Shaun rounded the far side of the bin, coming over to the passenger side of the ambulance, the hobo weighing heavily against him. His wife was not behind him.
‘Lauren!’ he called sharply in a whisper. But she was not there. He panicked, a feeling of dread filling his stomach. He had not felt it since the day he heard that his parents had been killed. He went dizzy with fear, and his vision began to blur as Lauren appeared at the edge of the bin. She held something tightly against her chest.
‘God, what are you doing?’ Shaun spat in a mix of relief and fury.
‘The diary,’ she said simply. He had forgotten all about it, and right now he could not believe that she had run back into the room to get it. Was she insane? She had married him even when her father threatened to cut her out of the family fortune, but this was a whole new level of crazy, dashing across open territory in front of people who would shoot her if they saw her.
Unfortunately, this time they had.
The first shot hit the edge of the dumpster on the far side. It had come from someone over near the black cars outside the motel reception, a good hundred and fifty feet away. With that shot, all of the gunmen were alerted to their presence. There wasn’t time to sneak about now, no time to think, just time to rush up to the passenger-side door and shove the hobo inside. He fell across the bench seats awkwardly as Shaun climbed over him. The dead paramedic was still slumped at the wheel, and Shaun heard three slugs bury themselves in the body. Lauren threw the diary in and leaped for the open passenger door.
Reaching down to the column changer, using the paramedic’s body as cover, Shaun slammed the still-running van into reverse. He opened the driver’s door and hurled the dead man out, spinning the wheel away from the motel. The body went flying as the front end of the van spun around. He kept the van circling so it faced the car-park exit, and as it whooshed past the line of black cars bullets rained on the front and side of the vehicle.
As the back of the ambulance came level with the dumpster, Shaun slammed the transmission straight into second and gunned the gas flat to the floor. It took about half a second for the torque to kick in, and then the powerful engine pulled the van forward. The tyres smoked and screeched as they spun, and the hail of bullets was relentless. BLAM! BLAM! SMASH! The rear windows blew out. He sunk even lower into the seat. With each second, the ambulance put distance between itself and the gunmen in black.
Shaun slammed into third, then fourth and then, with a sound like the slowing of popcorn popping, the impacts became fewer and further between. Finally, they stopped.
They were clear.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Lauren asked as Shaun looked around for the paramedics’ radio. It sat on the underside of a large box hanging from the roof in the centre of the cab. He cursed. Both the radio and GPS unit had taken on the multitude of bullets that entered the cabin during their escape and were barely recognisable.
Shaun glanced in the rear-view mirror. The cone of a car’s headlights turned out onto the road from the motel and pointed at them like the glowing eyes of a demon.
‘Shit!’ Shaun cried. ‘They’re coming. Stay low. Do you still have my cell?’
Lauren patted her pockets and pulled out the phone. ‘Flat,’ she said, defeated.
‘Okay, okay. Hang on, we can’t be too far from a town now.’ Even as he said it he knew it wasn’t true. It had taken the ambulance more than forty minutes to get to them, and he wasn’t even sure which direction it had come from.
They pushed on into the night, without any idea where they were going or how long it would take to get there. They had a good start on the car chasing them, maybe a minute, but when the road straightened out, they could see the headlights gradually getting closer.
‘Why were they killing everyone?’ Lauren asked.
Shaun thought about the way the men had systematically burst into each motel room. One door at a time. Killing anyone who happened to be in there. They weren’t taking any chances on missing their target.
‘They were looking for something,’ Shaun answered. ‘They were looking for something or someone. They didn’t look like street hoods, they’re organised and calculating.’
They were both thinking it. The hobo lay slumped between them, his body curled awkwardly in the centre of the bench seat. He was breathing heavily again, and making the occasional groan, but he had not woken up.
‘How can he sleep through all this?’ Lauren asked, her pitch betraying her rising panic.
‘Do you still have that book?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied, pulling it up off the floor in front of her.
‘I think … I think that whatever’s in that book is the real thing, or at least someone thinks it, and they think it’s important.’ He looked at Lauren. ‘Important enough to kill for,’ he said, looking down at the crudely bound volume again, doubting himself, even as he spoke.
‘Keep reading it,’ he said. ‘There might be something in there that can help us.’
‘If this is what they want, let’s just give it to them,’ Lauren said, her voice sharp.
The thought had occurred to Shaun, but he dismissed it.
‘You saw what they did. Probably shot the clerk for being a smart-ass to them, then they killed everyone at the motel. Hell, they even shot the paramedics. I don’t think just handing this stuff over would make them stop, or save our lives.’
She knew he was right. Shaun paused, feeling more confident in his course of action. Although it seemed absurd to be reading while being chased, Lauren too knew that their pursuers would not stop. This diary might be their only chance to find a way out. At least for now they were out of range of gunfire.
�
�Read it aloud, will you? And hang on.’ The battered ambulance sped down the mountain road at incredible speed. Now forty-five or so seconds behind, another car sped after it. Closing in.
Lauren fumbled for the switch on the interior light and opened the pages with tears blurring her eyes. She wiped them, and focused on the words.
CHAPTER 8
‘Are you okay?’ I asked the boy. He was crying and his face was purple with bruises, but he nodded his head. ‘Mishca? Are you Mishca?’ He nodded again as I took him by the arm and helped him to his feet, and the wooden shards from the window scattered to the floor around us. The hut we were in looked like a storage shed. The thunderous roar of battle filled the street. Whoever the men on horseback were, they were fighting the Romans – swinging and slashing and kicking, less skilled than their adversaries but outnumbering and overpowering them.
I pulled the boy out into the street and led him back the way I had come. He followed, limping, at a good speed, fuelled by anxiety and the thrill of an unexpected escape.
We soon came across the boy’s parents lying in the street. The fighting had moved on from this area of the town and all along the streets people tended to the wounded and cried over the dead. On our approach, the woman wailed and threw her arms open. The boy forgot his limp and ran to catch his mother’s embrace. From the ground, the boy’s father reached up and pulled the boy down to him. I stood there, watching, glad for a moment to be a witness.
Looking around the dead and wounded people, I felt compelled to help. Leaving the boy and his father in a bloodied and heartfelt embrace, I did what I could for the people closest to me. One victim was no more than sixteen, cut down with purposeful strokes. Another, a man around thirty, lay near the boy, still gripping a crude digging tool, a trowel of some sort, in his limp hand. It was the tool of a farmer, not of a warrior. I dressed the wounds of the injured as best I could and then moved on.
As I fixed a splint to a man’s leg, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw Mishca’s father leaning heavily on his son. He beckoned me.
‘Stranger, you have saved my son. I cannot ever repay you, but now you must come inside. The soldiers will return at any moment.’
Sure enough, as the words left his lips, a melee exploded around the corner. A Roman guard was fending off two attackers who slashed and struck with relentless ferocity.
I followed Mishca and his parents into a doorway across the street as the fighting travelled closer. I raced back across the street to help some of the wounded into the house, while those who could walk unaided hobbled to their feet and followed. Inside, we slammed the wooden door closed and locked it.
‘The zealots have come,’ said Mishca’s father. ‘They battle the Romans, but they only bring greater wrath upon us.’
At that moment, I heard the thundering of hooves blast by the door, and the group in the house sank back. Once the sound passed, the man spoke once more.
‘You have saved my son, you have tended to my friends, and yet we do not know you. What is your name?’
I paused, then opting for consistency, said, ‘Saul. My name is Saul.’
Over the next few days, after the zealots had driven off the Roman attack, I learned more about where I was. It was a small village in the land of Palestine. This felt right to me but I did not know why, and I guessed that perhaps Palestine was my home. The people were a mix of Jews and Arabs, but the whole area was under Roman occupation.
I was told that normally in this area there were only a couple of sentries, and the people were left to themselves, but recently bands of religious zealots had attacked Roman posts in small towns like this one. Several days before the attack, zealots had stormed a town to the north, and in response the Governor of the region sent a legion of Roman soldiers to a neighbouring town to assert their continued authority over the land.
That is what had happened here. The village’s name was Chorazin, and it had borne the brunt of Rome’s retribution for an attack on a Roman outpost at Thella. They started by taking the children, killing anyone who tried to resist. Of course the families fought to keep their children, and as a result many people died. In the case of Chorazin, the zealots had followed Rome’s pattern and anticipated the attack; they had mobilised and struck at just the right moment, winning the battle but escalating the war.
I stayed with Mishca and his family for several weeks. I had no need to leave. My search was one of self-knowledge. I needed to know who I was and what I was doing, and Chorazin seemed as good a place as any to start that search.
Mishca’s father, Mycha, suffered from his wounds during those weeks. I had patched his leg, but he had a broken rib that was slow to heal, so I helped him in the fields where he worked. It was a good arrangement: I got to work and in return was given food and a place to stay. All the while, I hoped my memory would return. After nearly a month, it hadn’t.
One morning, as the sun bore down on me in the field, and sweat poured off my bronzing back, Mishca ran up to me. We had grown close in the time that I had been there. He was intrigued by this mysterious traveller who had saved him from the Roman cages.
‘I do not understand,’ he said as he panted up to me with water. ‘You told my father that you travel west, but you tell me you do not know where you travel!’ He was always full of questions. Especially ones I could not answer.
‘Yes, you have it right.’
‘Then, why do you travel at all?’ he looked quizzically up at me.
I smiled and winked at the boy. ‘I do not know where I am going. But you must not tell your father that or he will have me working the fields for him all year!’
The boy smiled, showing his bright white teeth. ‘You do not look very much like a Jew,’ he said. ‘Did you come from far away?’
I stopped and studied the boy for a moment. There was a keen intelligence in his eyes. I made a decision to confide in him then, both because I was growing frustrated with making up new lies and, for reasons I could not articulate, I trusted him.
‘Mishca,’ I said solemnly, ‘can you keep a secret?’ The boy’s face lit up.
‘What I am about to tell you is a secret between you and me. Do you understand?’ The boy nodded eagerly.
‘I have your word as a man?’ He nodded again, without hesitation. I looked him squarely in the eyes.
‘Mishca, I woke up last month with no clothes, no food and no idea who or where I was.’ I paused. His eyes narrowed. ‘I do not even know my own name.’
‘But you said your name was Saul.’
‘I made it up.’
‘But you saved me from the Romans.’
‘I saved you because you were in trouble, not because you were a kinsman.’
‘But … then …’ his mind grappled with the idea. ‘Then, how do you know what you’re doing? Who are your parents? Where do you live?’
I looked at the boy and smiled. Then shrugged. Mishca shook his head and turned it over in his mind. Then he surprised me.
‘Surely you can work a lot of it out?’ he started. ‘There are things you know about yourself that must help. You speak our language, so you must come from near here. You called out to the Romans in their tongue, so maybe you were one of the ones they captured as a child to join the army. My father says they do that. They take young boys from families and bring them up as Romans, or train them to fight in the great games.’
‘Games?’
‘It’s where they make men fight against each other to the death, or sometimes they even fight great ferocious beasts from strange lands. I mean, you know how to fight, so maybe you were in the army, although you didn’t fight like any Roman I’ve ever seen.’
For all the rambling, the boy was right: I needed to work to solve the riddle myself. Despite all the unknowns, there was one thing of which I was certain: there was something I was here to do. I had a purpose, a sense of it. There was a reason.
For the past few weeks that I had been in Chorazin, a feeling had been steadily build
ing in me that something was going to happen. It had grown from a twinge, but now it was an uncomfortable frustration. I knew I was here to do more than dig fields. I looked into the boy’s face.
‘You are right, Mishca. You are absolutely right. And you know why it is that I have to go now.’ I had dreaded telling the boy. His attachment to me was very strong, and I too was fond of him. His eyes dropped. He understood, but he wasn’t happy about it. Then he brightened suddenly.
‘That’s okay. When you find out who you are, you can come back and visit. Maybe you’re very rich!’
I laughed. ‘Maybe I am.’
At that moment there came a yell from one of the other workers in the fields. A man ran towards us, shouting frantically and pointing back behind him. As he approached, I heard him clearly.
‘Romans! The Romans have come back! They are coming here, a whole legion! The Romans are coming!’
My reaction was immediate. I scooped up Mishca in one arm and ran to where his horse was tied to a tree.
‘Ride straight home,’ I urged him, unfastening the animal. ‘Take your family to the grain store, hide in there. You understand?’
Mishca’s eyes were wide with terror.
‘Mishca!’ I barked at the boy. He refocused on my face. ‘Do you understand?’ I asked again. He nodded.
‘Straight home.’ I smacked the animal on the rump and it lurched forwards, kicking up dust as it sped off, the boy’s skinny body clinging tightly.
This road was the only way into the town from the Romans’ base at Capernaum, so I knew that Mishca had about a five-minute start. Workers ran from the fields and clambered into the surrounding trees to hide. I did the same, but with a different intention. The attack was unusual. The Romans usually took retribution on the neighbouring town only when they had first been attacked by zealots – following this pattern, the zealots now waited for the soldiers at Bethsaida to the south, leaving the people of Chorazin defenceless.
I picked up a sharpened metal hoe and ran to the trees near the edge of the road. I swung the hoe into the trunk of a tall, bushy tree not a foot from the edge of the road. I drove the hoe down again into the mark I had made, cursing the ineffective implement. A small chip flew out. Then I heard it.
