by Unknown
They would both be dead in a matter of seconds.
Agent Cutter smiled like he knew exactly what image was playing out in Shane’s mind.
Then he repeated, “Put her in.”
At the exact moment that he ended his command, the moment that the last letter left his lips and the sound resonated into the air, Cutter cocked the shotgun.
CRUNCH!
The sound was deafening in the night air.
Shane gazed down at Sun Good one last time. Then he knelt down over the grave, and as gently as he could, he lowered her in.
He couldn’t reach all the way to the bottom. So he had to drop her. Her body hit the bottom of the box with a thud.
“The lid,” Cutter said. He leaned in to watch.
Shane slid the lid over the box and saw Sun Good’s face for the last time. For a brief moment, Shane thought that he saw her regain consciousness. He thought that he had seen her eyes open. It looked like she had stared right up at him. Her last sight was of Shane burying her alive.
“Get the shovel,” Cutter ordered.
He stepped back away from the grave and made a gesture, pointing the barrel of the shotgun at a shovel on the ground and near the fence.
Shane picked it up.
“Bury her,” Cutter said.
In his mind, Shane imagined that horrible night when the StoneCutter had buried his parents alive. He reimagined our birth.
I whipped my tail around in Shane’s brain. I tried to distract him from this memory. I tried to keep his mind fresh. He needed to focus. He needed a plan to escape. But nothing worked. Cutter’s evil act was too powerful. Shane’s senses and mind were lost.
It took twenty minutes. And finally Sun Good was buried under six feet of dirt.
Suddenly, a noise like a banshee cried through the night. It sounded muffled, yet nearby. It made Shane cringe. It made his blood boil. It was Sun Good. The drugs had worn off because now she was awake and screaming.
Shane tightened his grip on the shovel. Cutter saw him doing it. So Cutter took a big step back and pointed the shotgun at Shane’s face.
“Don’t even try it!” Cutter said.
Shane said nothing.
He tossed the shovel off to the side. It flew through the air and clanked off his father’s tombstone.
“Remember, she may only have an hour before her air runs out.
“I’m going to give you the chance to save her,” Cutter said.
Shane knew that it was probably bullshit. He knew that Agent Cutter had no intention of giving him the chance to survive. But what other choice did he have?
Shane waited for me. He hoped. No he prayed that I would save him.
My instincts were ancient, the oldest on the planet. Primal urges were as old as blood and bone. Still, I had no plan. There was no chance left.
“Go over to the other grave,” Cutter said.
Shane moved to the other grave. He stopped and looked down into the dark pit.
He stood over his own grave.
A man standing over his own grave was a rare thing. But it did happen. And now it was happening to Shane.
At the hour of a man’s execution, typically he prayed to God. Not Shane. He closed his eyes and prayed for me.
For the very first, and possibly last, time in our life, he spoke to me out loud.
He said, “If you are there, I need you now. I need you now more than ever.”
“God?” Cutter asked. “I never would have pegged you for the religious type.”
Shane closed his eyes and said one final thing. He said, “Save her.”
Cutter lowered the shotgun all the way down to his side.
He didn’t want to kill Shane that quickly. He wanted Shane to suffer in his tomb. Cutter brandished his Glock and shot Shane twice in the chest.
|||||
During Cutter’s earlier struggle with Shane, there’d been a moment when he’d felt Shane’s body. In that moment, he’d never realized that Shane wore the Kevlar from the trunk of his FBI car.
The moment when Cutter’s second shot rang out into the night, something else happened. A thunderclap echoed through the night sky.
A once clear and starry night had turned black and stormy. Another thunderclap sounded. It echoed over the lake, through the trees, and off the exterior of the manor.
A lightning bolt fired across the sky. Then another.
Cutter cursed. He holstered his gun. He made one quick glance down at Shane in the grave.
Shane was unconscious. He looked as good as dead.
Cutter wanted to be done with it and on the road before the rain started. He grabbed the shovel and began to cover Shane’s body with dirt.
Shane wasn’t lying in a box like Sun Good. He lay in a pit with nothing but dirt.
Cutter figured that with the two gunshot wounds, not having any oxygen, and soon being flooded in wet mud, Shane was going to die.
No question.
Cutter used all of his strength and focus. He had Shane’s body buried under a heap of dirt in minutes.
The rain began to pour down just as the last shovelful of dirt fell over the grave.
In seconds, rain poured even harder. It was really coming down.
Below the surface of the dirt, I slithered back and forth in Shane’s head. He was not moving.
The gunshots hadn’t pierced the Kevlar. The bullets were caught in the advanced weave of the bulletproof vest. Shane’s chest had not been penetrated. The vest worked exactly as the manufacturer had claimed it would.
Still, the impact from both bullets hurt like hell.
The pain and the fall had been so intense that Shane had completely passed out from it.
I rattled around in his head as much as I could, but he wouldn’t wake up.
Not good. Shane’s body had shut down, which meant that I was about to shut down.
There was too much immediate danger for him to be unconscious. He was running out of oxygen. And now water was beginning to seep through the dirt above him. Soon he would drown.
|||||
Like a computer that melted down, I had to reboot Shane.
Vigorously, I pounded on his insides. The impact of the bullet had cracked a few of his ribs. I stitched and glued them back together as best I could. I was not gentle to Shane’s body. He was running out of time.
I rammed his heart on my way back to his brain. Suddenly his eyes opened wide.
Dirt and water seeped across his face. It was thick. He couldn’t see anything but darkness. It took a second, but he realized that he was buried in the mud.
Shane didn’t attempt to breathe. I had wrapped my tail tightly around his inner throat, preventing him from breathing. It was better for him to be slightly choking rather than breathing in thick mud. The mud would have drowned him—fast.
Although I could prevent him from swallowing and breathing in pints of dirt, the one thing that I couldn’t stop was the paralysis that hit him like a truck. He knew that he was buried in the ground, and the one thing that Shane feared was closed-in spaces.
Shane’s degree of claustrophobia was paralyzing. It was his kryptonite.
He didn’t have time for it. So I stretched out and buried my claws into his brain. Blood seeped from the holes. He was now at my full control.
Forgetting his fears, putting everything aside, Shane was now determined to escape and save Sun Good.
He began burrowing through the wet mud in front of him. He burrowed and fought and struggled. He kept his eyes shut. The mud stung them.
After a dramatic climb, Shane’s fist punched through the surface of the ground. He felt the cold night air blow across his wet knuckles.
Shane grabbed the side of the grave and pulled with his hand and pushed up with his legs. It was like trying to climb out of quicksand, but eventually the effort paid off, and he escaped the grave.
Shane slumped over, exhausted from the climb from the grave. This was the second time in his life that he’d escaped his
own grave.
Shane stopped to catch his breath for only a moment. Then he jumped to his feet. The rain pounded down on top of him.
I heard it hammering on the top of his shaven head. The sound echoed through the chamber of his skull.
In the struggle to escape, Shane had lost most of his kill-suit. The scarf, tie, and even the pea coat had been swallowed up by the ground. Shane glanced back at the grave. The hole that he had left was now gone. It had been swallowed up by a deep puddle of mud like a sinkhole.
Shane fell to his knees and huffed the air. He sucked in the wet air in deep, repeating breaths. Then he gasped as the pain from his chest returned.
Shane grabbed at his chest. Then he ripped away the rest of his shirt. He pulled the Kevlar completely off.
His bare chest was cold and exposed to the relentless, beating rain, but at least the Kevlar wasn’t constricting his breathing any longer.
Shane enjoyed some more air and then refocused on Sun Good.
He had lost track of the time, but it hadn’t been long. There was a chance that she was alive.
Shane scampered to the shovel and picked it up.
“Sun!” he screamed out. The rain and thunder made his words barely audible, even to himself.
“I am coming! Hold on!”
Shane used all of his might and stabbed the wet, soggy ground. He stabbed it like he was killing it. The shovel pierced into the muddy ground.
Shane stabbed and tossed a shovel full of mud off to the side. He stabbed and tossed. Stabbed and tossed. Stabbed and tossed.
The entire endeavor to rescue Sun Good took only a few minutes, but it felt like an eternity. The wet mud made it ten times easier, but the rain kept refilling the hole with more water, better than dirt. Dry, hard dirt would’ve taken forever to dig up.
After he reached the top of the trunk, Shane threw the shovel aside. He knelt down on top of her coffin and tore the lid off.
He gasped.
The box was flooded with muddy water. As his eyes focused on the murky water, Shane saw Sun Good’s pale skin. Her eyes were wide open and lifeless. She was dead.
Shane stared at the corpse of the love of his life. She was the only woman that had ever made him feel normal—human.
And he had killed her.
Her corpse floated between the top layer of the murky water and the floor of her coffin.
Shane didn’t shed a tear. Nothing happened. I mean nothing. His heart kept beating. His mind was empty. He had become colder and more primal at that moment than I had ever seen him.
Sun Good was dead. And so was the human side of Shane Lasher.
|||||
Shane stood in the open doorway to his house. The rain poured behind him like cold, wet shell casings bouncing from a semiautomatic rifle. The thunder rolled like dynamite exploding in the distance. The lightning crackled and sent flashes across the sky like violent comets.
And the fury raged inside him. On the inside, he fumed, he boiled, he brimmed, and he roared.
The only way to describe what I could see from inside my cockpit, the only word that would describe what it looked like from in here, was red.
Shane stepped inside the hallway to his house. He didn’t bother closing the door behind him. He didn’t care about the wet footprints that his shoes made. He didn’t care about the noise that he made. He didn’t even care about the mud and dirt that he trailed through the old house.
Shane moved through the kitchen and into the long hallway to the living room. He stopped in the center of the hallway and looked at the splintered wall from the shotgun blast.
He stared at it.
Then he arched his eyebrow and raised his head. A thought crossed my mind, and I whispered it to him.
I said, “What if Cutter is still here?”
Shane’s face showed the slightest hint of recognition. It was in the corners of his mouth. Wet dirt seeped past his lips and he smiled.
He walked through the foyer and into the living room.
The enormous living room had high ceilings, a fireplace, dusty bookshelves, and a large staircase. The furniture was old and still covered by sheets.
Shane studied the floor toward the staircase. A layer of dust had settled across it. No one had walked those stairs in years.
Shane turned toward the front door and violently threw it open. The driveway was empty.
Cutter had left.
Shane returned to the living room. He looked around. There was nothing of interest.
Shane returned to the kitchen and shut the backdoor. He glanced around the room and that was when he noticed it.
Sun Good’s purse was on the countertop of the island in the center of the kitchen.
Shane went to it and emptied the contents onto the countertop.
He stared at the pile of Sun Good’s belongings. There was her cell phone, lipstick, some other make-up items, a three-inch retractable blade, a crumpled paper, a wallet, a business card, a notepad, and a Taser.
Shane grabbed the Taser. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the Taser that he had stolen from the FBI car. He doubted that it still worked after climbing out of that muddy grave.
He flicked the switch on the side of the device.
At first nothing happened, but after a second attempt, sparks formed and a tiny bolt of artificial lightning shot from the end of the Taser.
Shane held up both Tasers and fired them simultaneously.
The little bolts of lightning danced from the tips of both Tasers.
They reflected in his eyes. I watched from inside him and smiled.
Cutter would die.
|||||
Shane sifted through his father’s closet. He hadn’t set foot in his parents’ bedroom in over a decade. He’d spent most of his childhood far away from this place.
Shane had never really even seen any of his father’s clothes.
His father had died the night that he was born; he had never even known what size his father was. He had seen photographs of his parents, but he’d never really thought about how big the man was.
Luckily, it appeared that he was average build. Actually, he was smaller in the chest than Shane, so his shirts were tight on Shane. But he’d make one fit.
Shane sifted through them, not really caring about style. He was more concerned about getting mud all over his dead father’s closet.
Shane pulled out a black V-neck sweater. It would do. He pulled it on. It was a little small; the sleeves weren’t quite long enough. Shane had long arms. Apparently, Sebastian Lasher hadn’t had the same problem.
Shane rolled up the sleeves and settled for just the sweater. Then he thought about his shoes and socks. They were soaked. They made his feet very cold. It was just uncomfortable.
Shrugging off the fact that he would muddy up the old bed covers, Shane sat on the bed. Dust flew into the air. He ignored it and reached down. He didn’t even care about his laces. He simply flung his shoes off. Then his wet socks.
Shane’s feet felt incredibly liberated to be out of them.
He walked to a dresser and started pulling the drawers open until he came to his father’s sock drawer. He pulled out a random pair of black dress socks. They worked fine. He returned to sitting on the bed and slipped the socks on.
Shane looked down at his shoes and thought of putting them back on. That was when he noticed how immense the water damage was. The soles of the shoes had peeled away in the fronts of both shoes. One of them was dangerously close to being absolutely worthless.
Shane shrugged and stood up on his new, dry socks. He went back to the closet and looked at the shoes. He looked for comfort. He found five different pairs of running shoes. He grabbed the darkest pair, black shoes with gray and white stripes.
He returned to the bed and put the shoes on. They were a size ten and he wore an eleven, so he loosened the laces as best he could and tied the shoes. They were comfortable enough.
Shane thought about changing into a dry pai
r of pants, but from the look of the pants that hung in the closet, Shane knew they were all too short. So he settled on just keeping his own. They were still wet, but eventually they would dry.
Shane walked down the stairs, through the living room, and back into the foyer.
He walked back into the kitchen. He grabbed Sun Good’s cell phone. He turned it on. There was no signal. Then a message flashed across the screen.
