Camden and Hannah followed her on either side, propping her up when she struggled to pull her boots from the boggy mud.
It was going to be a long, hard journey.
34
The woods came alive at night, with owls hooting and the undergrowth rustling with mice and other tiny woodland creatures.
At night, the fields made them especially easy to spot. They were lucky it was a cloudy night, obscuring the worst of the bright moonlight attempting to stream down on them like God’s spotlight. Twice so far they saw vehicles, one coming from the east, the other from the west, each drawing closer like a noose about their necks.
“They’re trying to circle around us,” Tanya said, “to cut us off at the next crossroads. We’re going to have to circle around them and attack their rear.”
“How do you want us to do that?” Katie said.
The twins exchanged a look. “You’re not going to be the one doing it, babe,” Tanya said. “We are.”
The twins couldn’t meet Katie’s eyes.
“You need to keep heading toward the next crossroads,” Tanya said. “Keep going until they see you and tell you to come out from wherever you’re hiding.”
“You want to use us as a distraction?”
“More or less,” Ronnie said.
“There’s no ‘less’ about it!” Camden said. “There must be another way through.”
“Not with them drawing up behind us as fast as they are,” Tanya said. “They’ll catch us before we find another route. I’m sorry. This is the only way forward and we don’t have much time.”
“We’ll do it,” Katie said.
Camden’s head snapped around in her direction. “You can’t be serious.”
Katie didn’t take her eyes off the twins. “It’s the only way, isn’t it?”
The twins didn’t nod. They didn’t need to.
“We’re going to leave you now,” Tanya said. “We’ll sneak past them and come at them from the other side. They won’t even know we’re there. They know we’ve got you kids with us–”
“Young adults,” Darryl interjected.
“Now’s not the time, doofus,” Camden said.
“Who are you calling doofus, doofus?”
“We understand the plan,” Katie said to the pair. “Good luck. We’ll see you on the other side.”
She hadn’t meant to say it like that, but the words were pertinent. On the other side of the hill or the other side of death?
The twins disappeared into the scrubland, keeping themselves low and hugging their rifles close to their chests.
“I guess it’s up to us now.” Hannah steadied Jodie on her shoulder.
And what a sorry state we are, Katie thought.
35
Every step they took brought them nearer to the dreaded crossroad. They were heading toward the trap that had been set for them. Either spring it now when they knew it was there, or wait it out and fall into it later.
Boy, what a choice.
Katie could see from the look on her brother’s face that he wasn’t happy with the situation, especially when his wannabe girlfriend was looking to him for leadership.
They came to a large boulder and it glowed with bright light behind it. It had to be LED – those were the only lights that worked after an EMP – and it marked the end of the road for them. This was it. Now or never. Out there somewhere, perhaps along a grassy verge or behind a thicket of weeds, the twins would be waiting for them to provide the distraction they needed.
Camden took Katie to one side. “We can’t do this. If we step around that boulder, they’ll shoot at us. If they do, they’ll hit Hannah and Jodie for sure.”
“It won’t come to that,” Katie said. “You heard what the twins said. They’ll be in position. They’re waiting for us.”
“Do you trust them?” Camden said.
It was a question she never considered before. Their grandfather trusted them, so she did. The question boiled down to whether or not she trusted her grandfather’s judge of character. The answer, she was surprised to find, was a resounding–
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
Camden looked taken aback. He bit his lip with uncertainty.
“They’ve gotten us this far. There’s no reason to think they won’t take us the whole way. But first, we need to put a little trust in them and give them the distraction they need to do their job.”
Camden wasn’t thinking straight. Was he willing to put Hannah’s life in these people’s hands? These stranger’s hands?
He shook his head. “I can’t do it. Not if it means losing her.”
And what about me, your sister? Katie thought.
She steeled herself against the answer. He didn’t care for her as much as he did for the Hannah girl. If she was his wife, she could understand. But a girl who was in all likelihood nothing more than a passing fancy? She didn’t understand that.
“All right, fine,” Katie said without a hint of spite in her voice. He’d made his decision and so had she. “Then the rest of us will have to do it.”
She took a step forward and felt a slight tug. Ella’s tiny hand in her own. The little girl looked at her with genuine fear in her eyes, the same fear she wore when she first came across her. Scallywag kept close to her feet, looking up into the little girl’s face.
Katie knelt beside her. The little dog leapt up to lick at the tears streaming down the little girl’s face.
She couldn’t put Ella’s life on the line. It wasn’t hers to give.
“You stay here with the others,” Katie said.
“I’ll go with you,” Ella said. “I’m not scared.”
But she was, and that rent Katie’s heart even further in two.
“I know you’re not scared. This isn’t about being scared or brave. This is about protecting the things I care about.”
She couldn’t help but look at her brother. He’d always been a baby to her. Sometimes you had to put everything on the line to protect the things you cared about most.
“Stay here and be a good girl for your uncle Camden.”
Ella wiped a hand across her eyes and nodded. She hugged Katie one last time before she got to her feet.
Katie took a step toward the boulder’s edge. The light caught her fingers on one hand. It wasn’t warm like sunlight.
“Come out with your hands up,” a megaphone demanded.
“Katie, wait,” Camden said. “Please. Don’t do this.”
“Somebody has to. It’s okay. It should be me. You take care of the others, whatever happens.”
Camden’s eyes began to fill but the tears didn’t roll down his cheeks. If Katie didn’t hurry, her eyes would be watering too, and she needed her senses fully operational for when she stepped out behind this boulder – assuming a bullet didn’t tear right through her the moment she did.
She took a deep breath, let it out, and rounded it.
36
The light was glaringly bright.
Katie held up a hand to block the worst of it. She peered between her fingers with squinting eyes. There were three lights, each strapped to the back of a working vehicle.
She could make out little details of the men standing behind them. A pair of shuffling feet here, a rounded cap there. She couldn’t see the weapons in their hands but she could imagine them. She estimated a dozen armed men and women, give or take.
It was a lot less scary having a bunch of guns in your grill when you couldn’t see them. She felt the shadow of fear seep from her as if it were forming a puddle at her feet. She even managed to summon a small smile.
It came to a point where all you could do was smile, she thought. And if this wasn’t that moment, when was?
“Where are the others?” the megaphone demanded.
“There’s no one else,” she said.
They’d discover them shortly, of course, but what did it matter now to lie to the authorities?
“There were more of you. Where are they?�
��
“I don’t know,” Katie said.
A pause as the men conferred. Katie couldn’t hear their words but she could see the peak of the cap the speaker wore.
“Step closer.”
Katie did. By an inch.
“Closer,” the megaphone said.
Another inch.
“A lot closer.”
Two inches.
If the twins were going to open fire, they’d better hurry up and do it, she thought. They couldn’t open fire and deliver bloody hell after she was taken by the enemy.
“You look like you’re waiting for someone,” the megaphone said. “Perhaps we can help you out. A couple of your friends joined the party early.”
Soldiers hustled a pair of struggling figures over to the trucks. They muffled and kicked and fought. Katie wondered which pair the speaker was referring to. She selfishly prayed it wasn’t Aaron and her grandfather.
Please, please don’t let it be them.
There was nothing she wouldn’t do for them. She’d throw all caution to the wind and give them whatever they wanted so long as they didn’t harm a hair on their heads. She never realized how powerful her emotions were toward her grandfather before. She blinked back tears and concentrated on the flailing figures.
Someone took a cloth out of one of their mouths and they let out a bloodcurdling scream.
“Run!” they bellowed.
An armed soldier smacked Tanya across the face.
“I’m sorry!” Tanya screamed and received another smack for her trouble.
The man holding the megaphone waved a hand and the twins were taken away.
Despite the dire situation, Katie felt some relief that at least her grandfather and Aaron were still out there somewhere. And so long as they were free, there was always the chance they would be rescued.
Or avenged if things went south.
She had no doubt in her mind whatsoever about that.
“We know there are more of you,” the megaphone said. “Tell them to come out and we won’t harm them.”
Katie’s heart was in her throat. Angry vipers snapped at her insides and the breaths that sawed through her nose came thicker, louder in her ears.
She was beginning to panic.
If there were no twins to back them up, what were they supposed to do? They had no contingency plan for this, no last-minute idea or Plan C they could enact.
She would have to wing it.
She could buy time. But time for what? For the others to escape?
Where would they run to? The rest of the military unit was rushing up behind them, closing in one yard at a time. Any minute now, they would be surrounded.
Katie’s insides felt like water.
And any minute, a metal projectile would slam into her body and burst out the other side. She had no idea why they were hunting them, no idea why they descended on her grandfather’s farm.
But they weren’t messing around. They were looking for something and they weren’t going to let an eighteen-year-old girl get in the way of that.
Bang.
A bullet fired. From the direction of the military barricade before her.
Katie jerked down, falling to her stomach and pressing her hands to her head to shy away from the biting bullets.
One image flashed in front of her mind after another.
Her mother. Her father. Her brother. Ella. Best friends from school. One after the other, and a million other memories she’d long since forgotten. Images that told the story of her life. She realized this must be what they referred to as seeing your life flash before your eyes.
And she knew she was going to die.
The existence she’d known was drawing to a quick and sudden end, just a few months shy of her nineteenth birthday. She felt sad for the things she wished she’d done, for the things she planned on doing but never got around to. Everything paled into the background, turning opaque as she considered all the things she thought were so tough, so difficult in a life rife with prosperity.
A thought bubbled to the top. I should have asked him out. I should have kissed him on the lips. I should have told him how I felt…
She had nothing to lose. What had she been so afraid of?
Rejection. Of seeing an expression on his face she didn’t like. One of disgust? Dismay? Disappointment?
Fear held her back from doing what she wanted to do. And now she was going to die, having never taken the first real step on her journey of life. Her existence consisted of a list of things other people wanted her to do, things her parents wanted her to do, what her friends expected of her. Rarely had she asked herself what she wanted.
And now she found herself lying in the middle of the road with gunfire exploding not more than half a dozen yards from her, threatening to crack her skull wide open and decorate some unknown backward country lane with her blood and guts.
She wished she made more of her life, wished she did something of significance, something worthwhile, something she could look back on and point to and say with a straight face that she was proud of having done it.
But what was there?
Ella, a small voice said. You rescued Ella.
Yes. There was that.
The thought of the little girl brought a smile to her face. Seeing Ella with Scallywag, playing together like all was right with the world, because to them, nothing was more important than wrestling that tennis ball from Scallywag and throwing it for him to chase, nothing was more important than getting an extra point for putting his tongue on her cheek and scoring another goal.
Katie Walker rescued a little girl made an orphan on one of the worst days in human history.
And then her thoughts began to run dry.
Death was taking too long.
I’m still alive…
That thought alone would condemn her, she thought. She shrank back into her shoulders like a turtle and awaited the final bullet that would cut out her vision and seal her doom.
But no bullets came.
They still flew – the tiny projectiles flying from the soldiers’ rifles. Some of the men screamed in pain as they took shrapnel to their chests and bodies.
But none of the bullets flew Katie’s way, at least not on purpose.
No bullets slammed into her.
More gunfire.
This time, it acted as a starting gun. She threw herself sideways to the side of the road and curled up into a ball behind a large rock that served as her only protection against the metal mosquitoes.
She didn’t know if any of the bullets flew in her direction or even if they’d already bitten her flesh, only that they were flying and most struck the metal of the vehicles parked at the crossroad.
Was it Bill? Or Aaron?
Had they done what the twins had failed to do and circled around the obstruction? If they had, they were doing a hell of a job. One soldier after another fell to their gunfire and once enough of the men in the vehicles had died, the gunfire from the other direction died too.
Still, Katie dared not get up.
Boots strolled across the tarmac and stopped before her hiding place.
“Thanks for the distraction, it was much appreciated,” a foreign voice said.
A hand extended down to her. It wore a glove she’d seen experienced gunmen sometimes wore. The spotlight turned half the man’s face into shadows and the other half was tanned with a big smiley grin across it.
Katie was right to trust the twins, and now she decided to put her faith in the grinning man too.
Not that she had much choice.
When she got to her feet, she found her brother and the others being guided from around the large boulder. Ella came running out and threw herself into Katie, tears streaming down her face. Tears of joy or relieved tears of terror? She couldn’t tell.
Katie clutched the little girl close and together, they wept.
37
Katie couldn’t let Ella go. She held her hand and kept looking down at her,
happy she got to be with this gorgeous little girl all over again. The men that saved them were not grandfather and Aaron but his friend – the one they were supposed to meet at Leighton Buzzard.
“You are lucky Geronimo Reyes see you come, no?” the friend said in a lilting accent.
He moved with nervous energy and a bounce in his step. A full head shorter than every armed man, he nonetheless carried himself with greater strength and poise than the rest of them combined.
One of the larger men carried Jodie in his arms. Jodie had been afraid of having any man touch her, but he gave her no more mind than he would to a tree. When she finally relaxed and calmed down, she curled up close to his chest and used his bulging bicep as a pillow and drifted to sleep.
Hannah and Camden walked alongside the big man. Hannah paid close attention to the big man’s muscles. Camden, trapped between the two, looked increasingly uncomfortable.
The twins sported matching cuts to their faces – Ronnie to his left cheek and Tanya to her right. They’d been hastily patched up at the side of the road and told they would get better medical help once they reached the castle.
Castle?
Darryl, still wide-eyed from the confrontation, shuffled along on feet that might have been caked in concrete. A couple of the other armed men hung at the back to ensure he didn’t get lost on the way.
Their rescuers wore the same worn earthy tone clothes and carried their weapons with practised ease over their shoulders. The only item that could be considered any kind of uniform was their matching flat caps.
A lad just a few years older than Ella came running down the road. Geronimo scooped him up and swung him around in a circle. He leaned down, the boy balancing on Geronimo’s thigh.
“Hello,” Geronimo said. “Tell her your name, Frederico.”
“Frederico.”
“And tell him your name, little girl,” Geronimo said.
Ella shied back and looked at Katie apprehensively.
Cut Off (Book 2): Cut Throat Page 12
