Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  He’d been slipping in and out all night. The bruises on his ribs and his cheek were killing He could have sworn he heard the door to their little prison open.

  Someone stepped inside. He moved as a shadow, but he kept the door open behind him, and somewhere in the house someone must have left a lamp on, because he cut a silhouette in the darkness.

  It was a man, one of the terrorists, but there was no way to tell which one. Until he spoke.

  “Don’t do it, woman,” Brother Stephen said.

  Ryan heard clothing rustle, and he heard his mother make a whining sound. She pleaded.

  “This doesn’t need to be difficult,” Brother Stephen said.

  With those words, Ryan knew what the intruder was going to do. He knew what rape was. He heard springs squeak as he watched the invading shadow sit on his mother’s bed.

  She made more frightening sounds, and there was more whispering. Ryan couldn’t make out all of it, but he could feel his mother’s terror from all the way over here.

  She said, “My son,” and something about that made Brother Stephen laugh.

  Ryan felt his face flush with anger. His heart rate doubled. Tripled. This was the asshole who had beaten the crap out of him when his hands were tied. The man who had promised to kill him if he stepped out of line even one more time.

  “I’m going to kiss you now.”

  That’s when something inside him snapped. He tore off his covers and he launched himself at the beefy silhouette, charging full tilt, and aiming high. He had no plan, and no fighting skills, but there was no way he was going to let this asshole get away with what he was trying to do.

  As he closed to within the last foot, Ryan tucked his chin in a little and smashed the top part of his forehead into what appeared to be the attacker’s temple. Something flashed behind Ryan’s eyes on impact and a jolt of pain lit him up from forehead to tailbone. He smelled blood, and then he tasted it. A second later, he felt it streaming down his face, but by then, he was airborne, and as he tumbled, he felt what he somehow knew to be Brother Stephen’s jaw nestled in the crook of his elbow. He clamped down on it, turning as they fell. When they hit the floor, Brother Stephen’s head hit first, and then Ryan landed on his shoulder and rolled. Something snapped, the sound making him think that he’d broken his shoulder. Except the pain never came.

  Everything happened so quickly. Behind him, his mom screamed, but at a whisper level.

  He couldn’t care about that. He needed to prepare for the counterassault. When Brother Stephen got the opportunity to throw a punch-if he really put all of his strength behind it-he’d separate Ryan’s head from his shoulders. He’d already caught a glimpse of the attacker’s power while he was holding back. This time, one of them was going to die.

  Ryan scrabbled to his feet and found Brother Stephen where he lay on the floor and he fired a savage kick into what he thought was his head, but he really had no idea. The kick landed firmly, though. And Brother Stephen didn’t even grunt. He must have been knocked unconscious.

  Fire flared to Ryan’s right. He whirled to see his mom holding a wooden match high to illuminate the scene. Her face looked pale in the yellow light and tears streaked her face. Her hand shook.

  “Are you okay?” Ryan asked.

  She just stared at the form on the floor. “He was going…” Her voice trailed away.

  “I know,” Ryan said. He pivoted on his heel and looked around the boxes and crap that surrounded him to find a lamp. He lifted it off the box closest to his mother’s bed-the one she used as a nightstand-but by the time he got the globe lifted to expose the wick, the match had burned to a nub and Christyne had to light another one.

  The wick ignited easily, and the light got even brighter as Ryan lowered the globe, the brightness creating sharply defined, dancing shadows. He swung the lamp to assess the damage done to Brother Stephen.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ryan breathed. The attacker lay still on the floor, his dick and his balls hanging out the front of his unbuttoned pants. He shot a look back at his mom, working hard to swallow the anger that welled inside of him. When she looked away, so did he, sorry for the thoughts that had entered his mind.

  Holding the lantern out in front, Ryan moved closer to Brother Stephen, and stooped to get closer still. Exposed junk aside, something wasn’t right about the way he was lying on the floor. He seemed too flat-like a balloon version of himself from which maybe an eighth of the air had been released. And his head. It was at an odd angle, an inch or two farther to the side than it should be.

  Finally, Ryan saw Brother Stephen’s eyes. They both were open, but the left one just a little more so than the right one.

  “Holy shit, Mom,” Ryan breathed. “I think he’s dead.” He turned to look at her. “I think I killed him.”

  Christyne brought her hands to her mouth. “Oh, no. Oh no, oh no, oh no…”

  Ryan hurried across the room, pushed the door shut, and hurried back. “Mom, what are we going to do?” His mind raced. If those assholes came trooping in here again in the morning and they found their buddy-their brother -dead, God only knew what would follow. He decided to answer his own question. “We need to get out of here.”

  Christyne dismissed it out of hand. “They’ll shoot us.”

  “Mom, they’re going to shoot us anyway. They said they were going to do it before, and now they almost have to.”

  “We need to hide the body,” Christyne said.

  “But he’ll start stinking,” Ryan countered. “Especially when they crank that furnace up again in the morning.”

  “Maybe he’s just unconscious,” Christyne said.

  Ryan rolled his eyes. “Look at his face. Have you ever seen a live person look like that?”

  She nodded. “Okay,” she conceded. “Okay, he’s dead. We need to do something with him.”

  “We can’t put him outside, or people will find him.” Ryan looked around. “Maybe we can hide him under all these boxes and crap.”

  “But what if they come looking for him and find that we hid him?” Christyne thought aloud. “Won’t that just make us look that much worse? Anger them that much more?”

  “We killed one of their brothers, Mom,” Ryan argued. “I think they’ll pretty much go off-the-charts pissed when they realize that.” He gave her a hard look. “We need to get out of here. We don’t have a choice anymore.”

  She looked across the room. “The door’s unlocked,” she said. “Could it be as easy as that?”

  He shook his head. “If we get that far and get caught, it’ll all be over.”

  Ryan looked up at the ventilation widow, raising the lantern to get a better look.

  “There’s no way I can fit through that,” Christyne said.

  “I can,” Ryan said. He didn’t know how, but he also knew there was no choice. He started stripping off his jacket to make himself smaller.

  “Then what?” Christyne asked.

  “I’ll get help.”

  It was the best he could do on the fly.

  Christyne hesitated, the fear settling deeper into her features. “Suppose they see you?” she asked. “Suppose you get caught?”

  He kept stripping the clothes away until he was bare-chested again. Jesus, it was cold. “What difference does it make? They beat the shit out of me just for being here. Whatever they do if I get caught can’t be worse than what they’d do to both of us if we just sit here and wait.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she studied Ryan’s face. “Where are you going to go for help?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. There were those houses out there before we came through the big gate. Maybe they can help.”

  “Maybe they’re part of whatever this is.”

  “I could break into an empty one, then. All I need is a phone.”

  She was right. He could see that much in her expression; but it had to be a hard decision to let your son out of your sight. He got that. He also got that there was no other alternative.

>   Then it dawned on him how disgusting it would be to have a dead guy staring at her while he was gone.

  While she continued to think it over, Ryan stooped, grabbed two fistfuls of Brother Stephen’s shirt at the shoulder, and started to pull. As soon as the dead man’s shoulders cleared the floor, his head lolled at a horrifying angle back and to the side-as if he were staring over his left shoulder at his own butt-removing any doubt that a broken neck had caused his death. Ryan’s stomach flipped at the sight, and he redirected his eyes to the side.

  In the deep reaches of his brain, he felt a pang of awareness that he had actually killed someone. He also realized that he didn’t care. No remorse, no disgust. None of the emotions that he knew were appropriate.

  Christyne rose from her bed and scurried four steps to catch up. She stooped and grabbed the assailant’s pant legs to help. “Where are we taking him?”

  “Grab his ankles, Mom,” Ryan said, again shifting his gaze. “You’re pulling his pants down more.”

  Christyne adjusted her grip and lifted the body’s legs by his ankles. Together they moved the body to the corner opposite the chamber pot. They covered him with a table, and then stacked some boxes around him.

  “It doesn’t look like it did before,” Ryan observed when they were done.

  Christyne planted her fists on her hips and gave him that look. “Honey, if they come down here, I think the broken window and missing prisoner will clue them into something being wrong.”

  “Oh.” Ryan felt his ears flush. “I guess so. How long will it take for him to start to stink?” he asked.

  “Long enough,” Christyne said, but he could tell from her expression that she had no idea. “Don’t worry about that. It’s time for something to start breaking our way.”

  A moment passed. They all knew what the next step was, but it was a difficult one to take.

  Ryan made the first move, heading back toward Christyne’s bed and the ventilation window above it.

  “How will you find your way?” asked his mom.

  He didn’t look back at her as he answered, “Like you said, something’s got to start breaking our way.” He stood on the bed for a better look at the window. He twisted the latch and pulled the glass panel in. Since it was hinged at the bottom and tilted inward, that panel was the first obstacle to be overcome.

  “Blow out the lamp,” he said.

  As soon as darkness returned, Ryan leaned farther out from the bed, grabbed the panel with both hands, and then dropped all of his weight. It broke with a frighteningly loud crack.

  “Oh, my God,” Christyne hissed. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “That was the window.” He’d snapped it quickly because he knew that if he voiced his intention first, she would have wanted to talk about the alternative options. Screw that. He didn’t know what time it was, but he knew that the darkness was his only friend out there, and the more of it he preserved, the better his chances for success.

  With the window panel out of the way, the night was visible-a charcoal-gray rectangle against a black foreground. If he looked real hard, Ryan could see shadows.

  “Are you sure you can fit through that?” Christyne asked.

  Ryan was wondering the same thing. It was a ridiculously tiny hole. “Sure I’m sure,” he said.

  Christyne grasped his shoulder. “Promise me you won’t come back,” she said.

  He gaped.

  She chose her words carefully. “When you make your call for help, promise me that you’ll keep going. Promise you won’t come back to help.”

  Ryan felt something snag in his gut. He hadn’t thought it through that far, but this wasn’t what he was expecting. “I can’t just leave you behind,” he said. That’s not what Dad would do.

  “You won’t be,” Christyne countered. “You’ll be sending help. Makes no sense for you to walk back into danger.”

  “How will I know if you’re okay?” he asked.

  She looked straight at him. “My Ryan doesn’t fail.”

  Tears pressed behind his eyes. He had never heard her say anything like that. He failed all the time.

  He needed to say something, but he didn’t know which words would be appropriate. And he didn’t trust his voice to produce them. In the end, he chose to say nothing.

  He turned his back to his mom and faced the window. With a short hop, he was able to reach the window ledge. From there, a simple pull-up brought his face to the opening, where the frigid air assaulted him.

  Somewhere out there lay freedom or death. He didn’t see a way for it to end anywhere in between.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ryan had no idea that his head was as big as it was. Once his forearms were lodged in the opening of the window, he ducked his chin to fit through, but his nose and the crown of his head formed a wedge that blocked him from moving even an inch.

  By rolling his head to the right and pressing down hard with his left cheek against the ledge, he thought there was hope that he might be able to muscle his way through. He might have to leave his ears behind, but he could make it.

  Just as he started to worry about how he was going to fit the rest of his body through the opening, somebody-it had to be his mom-grabbed his legs at the knees and lifted them.

  “I’ll push as you pull,” she said.

  And that worked. With his head clear, his shoulders slid easily. He elbow-crawled his chest and belly clear, and once he felt his belt line against the ledge, he knew that he was home free. He pulled his legs and feet up, drew them under him, and he was free.

  The feeling was overwhelming. It took his breath away. He didn’t realize how crippling the isolation of imprisonment was until he left it behind. He rolled to his stomach and turned back to the window. Before he could even ask, his mom stuffed his clothes through the opening. He pulled them through.

  “Stay warm,” she said. “And be careful.”

  The blackness on his mom’s side of the window was absolute. As he wrestled back into his clothes, Ryan could see nothing, yet he knew that she was watching him, depending on him. Again, words failed, so he turned away without saying anything.

  There was no going back now. He was surprised that the thought brought little angst. What was, was. It was the same mental place he went to during a track meet.

  He couldn’t count the number of meets he’d won when he’d had no business winning. He wasn’t the biggest, and Lord knew he wasn’t the strongest, but he was as fast as most, and if you didn’t let yourself think about defeat, it was amazing how often you could win.

  He needed to get going.

  Walking farther away from the house, he tried to make the night shadows jibe with his memories of the drive in on that first night, but the two were not equating for him.

  We arrived in the front, he thought. I must be in the back now.

  Moving even farther away, he navigated a wide circle to his left around the building. He was looking for a long tree-lined driveway leading to an elevated front porch. Once he saw that-or at least what looked like that in the darkness-then he could begin to retrace their route.

  As his eyes adjusted to the night, he realized that the lack of a moon was at least partially compensated for by a sky full of stars. The edges of the shadows were surprisingly sharp, he thought, if mottled by the trees, and he realized that he would be visible to others who might have been gazing out at the night.

  When he turned the second corner, he saw the porch and the long driveway. Their minivan was gone, though. In fact, there were no vehicles at all. Yellow light flickered in the windows. He had no way of knowing if there were more people inside, or if the place was empty, and he couldn’t afford the risk of checking.

  His mission was to get help. If he went back to the cabin and got caught, God only knew what would happen to them, but the one thing that was guaranteed was that this opportunity for rescue would evaporate.

  And then there’d never be another chance.

  He ha
d to keep going. He’d promised he’d keep going.

  Dropping to a low-profile crouch, he turned his back on the cabin and moved to the cover of the trees.

  His plan-if you could even call it that-was to avoid the roadbed itself because he thought he’d be too visible. Problem was, by staying off the road, he had to walk, climb and crawl through all kinds of weeds and sticks and shit, and in the process he made the noise of an advancing army. After about twenty yards of that, he made the decision to stick to the edge of the roadbed and move slowly. If a vehicle or a person came his way, he’d just have to hope for enough time to drop out of sight.

  He had no idea how long he’d been walking down the driveway, but it felt like a long time. Was this the correct way to the fence? He knew they’d spent hours on the road, but he really had no idea how long they’d driven from the front gate to the cabin.

  The cold was becoming a problem again, causing him to shove his hands deeply into his coat pockets. His nose ached from it, and when the wind blew, it hurt his eyes. He tried to remember what the local weatherman had said about this cold snap, but Ryan never paid any attention to the news, unless there was a possibility of schools closing.

  Is anybody missing me at school? he wondered. Outside of his track team, he didn’t know many people. Come to think of it, he didn’t know that many on the track team, either. Since most of them had grown up together, there really wasn’t a lot of room for newcomers in their cliques.

  He and his mom had left their real friends down in North Carolina at Fort Bragg-those were the ones who would notice they were missing, except they’d been missing since summer, when his mom had decided to come north. Other than Aunt Maggie, no one in their circle would care enough to report them missing, and Aunt Maggie was visiting a friend in France.

  All the more reason for him to be heading off for help on his own.

  As he trudged on, it was hard to tell if the road he was walking on was paved or if it was merely frozen dirt, but as he hunched against the cold and watched the shadows of his feet take step after step, he wished he’d thought to wear warmer socks. The cold came up through the soles of his Nikes as if he were barefoot.