by AJ Scudiere
Several more shots were fired in rapid succession, and he and Reenie realized something very important: No one was firing at them.
Everything was aimed at the big house. Since neither he nor Reenie had fired a single return shot, it was relatively unlikely that anyone coming up even knew they were here. If they played their cards right, that could be used to their advantage.
Using hand gestures—probably very improperly—he signaled to Reenie that he wanted her to stay here and cover him.
She frowned, waved her hand back to him, and he tried again.
Still, Reenie shook her head at him before scooting toward him. She stayed low, an odd look on her face that—only when she got close did he figure it out—was exasperation.
She blinked twice and held her gun aimed away from him. “We can talk, you know.”
Yeah, he should have known.
Two more shots rang in the distance, and he heard glass breaking again. Instead of fearing for lives, which he wasn’t able to do for fear he’d break down, he got mad about the glass. The windows on the house had survived almost 200 years unbroken. They had warped and started to droop the way old glass does, an authentic look that couldn’t be duplicated by contemporary measures. And some idiot was shooting them out.
After suffering an involuntary flinch, Reenie looked at him again. “What were you saying?”
“I don’t think they know we’re over here. I should be able to sneak out the back and around the cook house and see if I can get a better shot off before they find me.”
She looked at him blankly. “You were trying to say all that with gestures when you don’t know sign language and have never been in the army?”
He wanted to smile and call her a smart ass, but another shot rang off, this one clearly coming from the big house. Evan prayed like hell that it was Ivy, Reggie, and Kay shooting back.
His thoughts were interrupted again by Reenie saying, “I’m coming, too, Ev.”
“No.” It was dangerous and he didn’t want to worry—
“Oh, okay.” The sarcasm embedded deep in her tone told him what was coming. “I’ll stay here and not cover you because I can’t see you once you round the corner. And I’ll stay by myself and do nothing just because you don’t want to worry. Oh, and if anyone comes storming in here, I’m either toast or a hostage. Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.”
He sighed as another bullet went soaring in the distance. “Are you done?”
“Are you?” She stared at him.
He sighed. “Yes, Let’s go.”
Together they shifted out the back door, listening to the seemingly random volleys of shots. Luckily, no one screamed. From where it sounded like the shots were originating, whoever it was wouldn’t be able to see the back door to the Overseer’s open. That should be obscured by the kitchen house, and if he and Reenie could sneak in without being seen . . .
Then again, if they were seen, he might just die tonight. But since he might just die tonight anyway, he squeezed Reenie’s hand and looked her in the eyes one last time. They were exposed there in the small back courtyard between the buildings, but it needed to be done.
“I love you. I want to marry you.”
She squeezed his hand back. “Then let’s go shoot these a-holes.”
God bless Southern women.
He crouched low into the tall grass and tried not to let the movement give him away. A slight wind had kicked up, which he was hoping would work in his favor for getting into position. Then again, it would work against them for shooting people.
Holy shit. He was going to go shoot people.
The only thing worse he could think of was getting shot by these people, or watching one of the others get shot by them.
He looked up at the main house for a moment and saw a rifle barrel poking out a broken window from the second floor. He imagined Ivy at the other end of it, sighting something. Someone.
Evan’s imagination must have been pretty good, because he saw fire shoot out of the tip just as he heard the blast. And in the distance he heard something yelp. Another smatter of fire was returned and he watched as a spot of wood along the siding splintered and rained down.
Reenie had gotten ahead of him and was almost inside the kitchen building.
He heard her voice in his head. Let’s go shoot these a-holes. He slithered in behind her and she headed for the window, Evan still right on her tail.
Just as they arrived, the glass shattered over them.
His eyes closed instinctively and his hands came up for cover. He tried to dive in front of Reenie, but only did half the job, the glass came so quickly.
By the time he opened his eyes, both of them were dressed in tiny shards. It littered hair and shoulders; some clung to shirts or jeans like snowflakes. His arms bore a thousand tiny cuts and so did hers. Blood ran from above Reenie’s right eyebrow, and she wiped at it absently as she commented, “Well, that was lucky.”
“Lucky!?” He hissed.
She nodded, “Now we don’t have to shoot out our own window and give ourselves away.” She was already moving. She didn’t stop to wipe at the blood again or check for injuries. Someone was shooting at her family and her house and . . . Evan scrambled to keep up.
He never had qualms punching someone who needed it. He figured he could even handle a knife in a fight, and he brandished the gun with ease. But when it came down to it now he was following her. Reenie was keeping mostly out of sight, but the barrel of her gun slowly slid between two shards remaining in the frame and her eye lined up right behind it.
Evan did the same at the other corner, and he waited.
It didn’t do them any good to fire at things randomly; they’d only give themselves away.
Nothing moved.
No shots rang and the night stilled while everyone waited.
Evan wondered if Eli Whitney knew that he’d died for that machine. That in destroying Hazelton’s livelihood he’d dealt a near death blow to a man who was already wounded by Whitney cuckolding him. He wondered if Edwin Carroll knew who had come after him and why. The man seemed to; he told Reggie he thought someone was looking into it. At least Reggie would now do everything in his power to keep the same thing from happening again.
In the distance, Evan saw something flutter near the edge of the barn, but he held his fire.
Then, the figured stepped a little further out and materialized into the shape of a man.
Evan reminded himself that all of his own people were accounted for, aimed and pulled the trigger.
His bullet left the barrel just a moment after Reenie’s.
Kayla watched the man in the distance come around the edge of the barn. She was sighting him when she watched him jerk, not once, but twice, and drop like a stone.
It only took her a second to figure out the shots had come from her side.
Evan and Reenie were outside. She just hoped they were under cover. That was hard to tell though. They could be on the roof of the Overseer’s. They could have snuck around the kitchen house, or into the kitchen house, or they could be on the roof of the kitchen house. So many options . . . most of them exposed.
She ducked instinctively as fire was returned. Okay, so there was more than one guy down there. She’d already figured that out. In fact, she calculated they were looking at a minimum of five guys, one of whom was probably their fake cop.
Though it appeared her side had the distinction of drawing first blood, the shooting could go on all night unless someone put a stop to it. If Evan and Reenie had nailed that guy, then they had drawn attention to themselves.
And why had no one in the house been hit?
She crouched behind the wall while Ivy lined up another shot. Reggie was still down at his post in the far room on the first floor. Kayla knew because she could hear his shots.
If she were planning this tactical assault it would have been just that: tactical.
If you wanted to kill peopl
e, you came in with enough guys, armed them all with rifles, and went for head shots. Whoever was funding this endeavor had enough cash to make that happen. There should have been five to eight men out there, strategically located, communication system in place. Each of them would sight a person in the main house and once everyone had a bead, drop them all at once.
No one would have had a chance to get away. It would have been nearly silent and it could have been several days before anyone found the bodies . . . except Marcus knew where they were. And there was a plan to go into effect upon their deaths. So as soon as Reggie failed to check in at the appointed time, Marcus would go broad with it. These guys knew that. Add in that there were already several zealous converts from her websites and there was no longer any reason to take them all out.
So shooting all of them wasn’t the plan.
On her hands and knees, Kayla made her way out of the landing area. She headed to the bedroom on her left and entered.
Car ties and cinderblocks littered the floor and the balcony door still stood ajar, just as she had hoped. Slithering out onto the porch, she clung to the puddles of shadow near the wall and moved into place before she could change her mind.
Once she stood, she’d be an easy mark. But she was betting her life that they weren’t actually shooting at the occupants of Hazelton House. Still, it was in her best interest to move the target somewhere else.
Then, with a deep breath, she popped up and started yelling for all she was worth.
“That fake cop you sent us gave us names. He gave us account numbers. We can find you all!”
As soon as the words left her mouth she realized that she’d just given them cause to take her out. So she started reciting the words the man had spoken, verbatim. She yelled out the account number he’d given them. She yelled out names of employers. She had to work quickly, talk fast, make sure they had more reason to shoot that fake cop than her. She wanted to get them to turn on him, make him have to shoot his own way out of here.
He’d already turned against the others, and his orders had been to take out anyone in his way. Her guilt was at an all time low. When she wasn’t immediately killed, she peered down the back hill, trying to make out shapes in the dark. As she watched, the shadow of the man that had fallen the first time started to get up.
Another came around near him, staying low. He started to help the wounded man, but someone from her side laid down fire and it didn’t happen. From where she stood, it looked like he was being dragged away, certainly still alive.
Kayla started yelling again.
She recited the intel about the oil spills and about the purposefully bad inspections. About the jobs the fake cop had claimed to perform. She rattled off dates Reenie had found and deposit dates into the account.
And then Kayla ran out of verbal ammunition.
She stood there, looking out over the shadows of her plantation home and she was struck by the stark beauty of it. By the idea that for several hundred years, people had stood on this balcony and looked out over this land. And they did it when there was no running water. They did it when there were no power tools or TVs, without decent lighting or even proper food preservation. They did it when babies were born and often died on the same day. And they were just as devious as any man alive today.
The first Charlene Hazelton had killed her own baby in this house, so that her husband wouldn’t see the child belonged to another man. She did it to hurt the baby’s father, and she did it because she seemed to have a cold, hard streak in the middle of her heart.
And here Kayla stood, two hundred years later, a gun in her hand, alongside Charlene’s many-times-great granddaughter, fighting over the same machine that started it all . . .
She had no more words to protect herself. And she was low on bullets, already well into her second clip. She stood on the porch and waited for some sort of resolution.
None came.
No one moved.
So she didn’t have a warning and didn’t have time to react.
It seemed the moment she heard the sound of a bullet tearing out of a gun from not too far away was the same moment she felt it rip through her chest.
Kayla heard the scream and could only assume it was her own.
Reacting purely on instinct, her hands clutched at her shirt and felt hot, thick liquid pumping down the front of her. It took a moment to process that it was her own blood. Her fingers started to grab at it, as though she could hold it and push it back into her system.
She felt gray and odd. Thoughts passed through her head, but ran too fast to be grasped. Stars started sparkling at the edges of her visual field, and she suddenly felt that gravity had cranked itself way up.
Needing to sit, she did her best to make a smooth transition to the floor boards, but she wasn’t sure she handled it so well.
It all must have happened very quickly, even though to her mind the sounds were slow and long, like a record played too slowly. Because she heard Ivy scream in response. Ivy wasn’t hit, the sound was angry, not pained, and it certainly wasn’t afraid.
In that moment, Kayla knew that losing her was the one thing Ivy was afraid of. Now that the possibility of that was off the table, now that it had become definite, Ivy had no fear at all.
Kayla heard her yelling that she was going to get every one of them. Ivy went through the broken window on the landing, judging from the sound. Though Kayla’s eyes slipped closed by some unseen force, she heard Ivy’s feet on the roof over the back ground-floor porch, then a thud onto the ground. Ivy must have jumped it, much the way the fake cop had.
Then, feet pounding, the yelling of promises, and before she had even cleared the edge of the kitchen building, gunshots, as Ivy went screaming across the plantation, hell-bent on revenge.
Kayla opened her eyes just enough to see she was right—the shadow of Ivy firing into the night as she moved closer and closer to the threat was the last thing she saw before unconsciousness claimed her.
38
Savannah Memorial Medical Center
Evan sat crumpled in the unforgiving chair, Reenie on one side of him, Ivy on the other. All three nursed cheap Styrofoam cups of coffee that was stale even though it had been made on the spot by the vending machine.
Ivy’s coffee was full, steam still rising off the top, and she blew on it, probably in an effort to maintain some normality. From the look on her face, she was just as concerned as he was. Evan assumed she was in even deeper with his sister than he’d originally thought. In just a few short months, her worry had grown to equal what he’d built up over Kayla’s lifetime.
Ivy wore a scrub top and three bandages. Her pajama bottoms had been cut away to make space for the dressing that wrapped her lower right leg. She had gauze around her right bicep and another on her left hand. All three were due to bullet wounds; all three had grazed her. Lucky son of a bitch.
Reenie sported butterfly bandages as well as the occasional small row of stitches marching along her otherwise unblemished skin.
Evan had his own band-aids, butterflies, and glue. The staff practically had to hold him down to keep him in the ER.
He, Reenie, and Ivy had raced here behind the ambulance that had taken so long to arrive. The EMTs found that Reenie, ever practical, had towels pressed to Kayla’s wound. She’d turned Kayla over and found the exit hole and stopped that up, too. Ivy had come running back, dripping her own blood in the process, and proceeded to pray to every God Evan ever heard of and several that he hadn’t. She’d done mouth-to-mouth when Kayla stopped breathing.
It went on for an eternity. Once the EMTs had gotten hold of her though, the pace became manic. The paddles came out, and the backboard was strapped on before Evan had even seen it arrive. They shuffled Kayla down the steps like they were robbing the place, each with one hand on the board, the other doing something vital.
And then the ambulance doors closed and she was gone.
Evan stood there, stunned before he even realized they
told him they were going to Savannah Memorial. Effingham didn’t have a level one trauma unit, and Kayla was definitely level one. They didn’t mention that she’d already died once. Twice, if Reenie and Ivy were right about her breathing stopping before the EMTs came.
He didn’t remember following the ambulance here. But he did remember the turn onto “Feel Better Drive” and being affronted by the stupid name. He remembered the three of them falling through the ER doors and thinking they were going straight to where Kayla was, only to all be stopped like thieves and thrown into ER jail for their own injuries.
Evan had been the first out. And he’d found the previous argument of “stay in the ER, she won’t be out of surgery for a while. There’s nothing you can do” to be far too painfully true. So Reenie and Ivy’s arrival was recent, and they had warm coffee to show for it. It took longer to put them back together than it had for him. Or else the ER staff simply saw that he would not be contained for long, and he was released to come contain himself in this horrid plastic chair and wait for word of his sister.
No one spoke and his thoughts wandered.
For a while he veered into anger. Why had she stood out there and yelled everything? Clearly she’d thought she was informing them of what her cadre already knew, but why? Did she think they would just leave and know there was nothing they could do about it? Maybe she had. Kayla had always been on the “knowledge is power” side of any argument.
Ivy turned and started to speak, her words sounding almost too loud for the otherwise empty room. Maybe because the three of them were huddled close in three adjacent chairs even though they had the entire waiting room to themselves in the early morning. It appeared only Kayla was in need of surgery at this hour.
Evan had to focus on Ivy, force his concentration in order for her words to make sense.
“There was blood by the barn. But by the time I got there everyone was gone.”
