by Dean Murray
My jaw dropped, the scream of horror caught in my throat. Catching a glimpse of me over the man’s shoulder, Nathan frantically motioned for me to retreat upstairs.
I only had time to withdraw one step before freak number one clambered to his feet, fixed his eyes on me, and charged. Freak number two followed close behind.
I was vaguely aware of the two in the living room turning to me at around the same time. Distantly, I was aware of one of them falling to the floor, and Gran standing over him with the fire poker. My ears picked up what sounded like Nathan finishing off the one in the kitchen with the knife.
Death all around me. Three of them came at me now. And, boy, were they fast.
Half way up the stairs, icy fingers gripped my ankles and jerked my feet out from under me. My face slammed into the edge of a step, and then was dragged across the coarse carpet as I was hauled back down the stairs. I dug my nails in, reached for anything to hold on to, but came up empty. Three sets of hands were on me, tore at my clothes, pulled my hair, and scratched my skin in their frantic attempt to get to me. My legs flailed wildly, and I thought I connected with someone’s face before a pair of hands restrained my legs to prevent me from doing further damage. Another set grabbed my arms and maneuvered them behind my back. I looked over my shoulder at the culprit, just as another body moved into my line of sight behind him.
A formidable Nathan threw himself at the one who had my arms restrained, wrestled him off me. Next, the weight on my legs lifted, leaving me to scrap one on one with the last one.
I wiggled out from under him enough to scramble up two steps. I turned as he lunged for me, kicked, and connected with his nose. It was a hard kick, but his lips merely twisted into an angry snarl as he leveled his gaze on me. His eyes shone a dark shade of gold—empty, with nothing behind them—like tiny portals straight into hell.
Behind him, Nathan impaled the one he had tackled, and twisted the knife into his chest, where his heart should be. I screamed and looked away. Too late. The vision was etched into my mind forever—another one for the nightmares. I pushed through the psychological trauma, pulled it together, and prepared to battle with the golden eyed freak on top of me again.
Only I didn’t have to.
Nathan stepped behind him, hoisted him off me, and plunged the knife into his back. Blood dripped toward me in a steady red stream as I frantically tried to crawl out from under it, and then...poof. The body disintegrated into a cloud of vapor. And that evaporated into...nothing.
Nathan stood over me, the man’s blood on his clothes, his face, and his hands. No body. At the foot of the stairs, the body that should have been there was also gone.
He had been stabbed in the heart, I was sure of it. So where was he?
My eyes met Nathan’s briefly before he turned to assist Gran. Together, they easily took down the last one, and he joined his buddies in their vaporized states. Or whatever it was that I had just witnessed.
I choked back the bile that rose in my throat and looked for something to lean against before I toppled over. As an afterthought, I opted to climb down the stairs first, before I fell down them.
Nathan stood over the body Gran had left on the living room floor. I had thought he was dead. He wasn’t. Not yet. Same with the first one Nathan had stabbed in the stomach. He was alive and groaning loudly from the kitchen floor.
Scary men, dead and vanished. Others left bleeding to death on the floor. I felt like I was in a Hitchcock film. There was no way this was happening. People didn’t just vaporize. I shut my eyes and counted to five before opening them again. The two bodies were still there; the other three were still gone.
I sat numbly on the bottom step, my legs too wobbly to support me any longer. Maybe I was going crazy? This had been the last straw. My brain simply couldn’t handle anymore death, and I snapped.
And started seeing things that weren’t really happening?
Gran came to my side and I looked up at her appreciatively. In my periphery, I saw Nathan plunge the knife into the chest of the man on the floor in the living room. Too late, I closed my eyes, trying to block it out. Gran’s hand rested on my shoulder, silently encouraging me to keep them shut as Nathan’s footsteps moved across the room. A moment later, the moaning in the kitchen stopped. I finally opened my eyes and wasn’t surprised to see that both bodies were now gone. Other than two pools of blood on the floor, and smeared all over us, no signs remained of the five men that had been in the house.
I couldn’t have imagined it. Even though I kind of wished I had. Even if that meant I was crazy.
Nathan looked a little concerned as he approached me where I rocked on the steps, my knees pulled against my chest in a sort of seated fetal position. After what I had just witnessed, he probably expected that I would need a strait jacket and a padded room.
He crouched in front of me, and used a kitchen towel to wipe away the blood on my face. I let him, in too much of a shock to care what he did. When he was done there, he moved to my hands. That was when I saw the blood all over them. I snatched the towel from him and scrubbed my hands until they hurt. My vision blurred from unshed tears, and I couldn’t tell if I had made any progress. I scrubbed harder, faster, desperate to get it off of me.
Finally, Nathan placed his hand over mine to stop me. “You got it.” He withdrew the towel from my trembling fingers. “You okay?”
I lifted my eyes to his and nodded numbly. I didn’t think he believed me, but we didn’t exactly have time to nurture my mental health at the moment.
He turned to Gran. “We have to go,” he said, and what little concern I thought I had seen on his face for me a second ago vanished.
I was vaguely aware of his voice in the distance as he spoke to Gran. I swayed back and forth, not listening to either of them. Five guys—the three creepy ones from the parking lot and the two that had been at the party with Alec—were dead and gone in a matter of minutes. Where did Alec fit in? Where did I? And where in the hell did they go?
Had Alec been here too? Or...had he not been here because he was already gone, killed on that dark narrow trail?
My heart lurched as if a cold hand had reached down my throat and gripped it. I lifted my eyes, widened with terror, to the man I knew nothing about as he wiped his bloodied knife with the towel. Perhaps feeling my gaze on him, he looked at me, his face blank.
“Did you kill Alec too?” The words stuck in my throat, and I nearly choked on them.
Nathan stared at me for a long time, then scoffed and turned away without an answer.
I took that as a yes and sprung off the steps, launching myself at his back like a feral cat. He spun around with lightening quick reflexes and caught me mid-leap. It was pathetic, really, how easily he swatted me off him. I regrouped and flew into him again, connecting a fist with his chest before his hands clamped around my wrists and froze my poorly planned assault. I shoved against him as hard as I could, but barely budged him.
“Did you kill Alec?” There was an audible tremor in my voice this time.
He looked at me and, even if only briefly, I saw a flash of compassion in his eyes.
No. No way. I must have imagined it. I shoved against him again. “Did you?”
His answer was stiff. “No.”
I didn’t know if I believed him, but then I had no way to find out one way or the other. With no choice but to take his word for it, I twisted my hands out of his grasp. He could have held me there all night if he wanted to, but he let me go and left me to rub my wrists as he crossed the room to grab my book bag off the floor. He turned for the door without another glance at me.
Gran called after him. “Nathan, wait.”
He stopped and turned, my book bag flung over his shoulder like he was about to walk to the bus stop. For a moment, it made him look less hostile. If I didn’t dislike him so much, I might have even found it cute.
He was nice looking. I couldn’t deny that.
Nor could I deny the fluttering in my sto
mach the look on Gran’s face was causing. She was up to something I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like. She turned to me, her face solemn.
“Go with Nathan, sweetie,” she said. “He’ll take care of you.”
Gran wasn’t coming with us? Oh, no. No, no, no.
“I’m not going anywhere with him!” I jabbed a finger in Nathan’s direction without bothering to look at him. I stared pleadingly at Gran. “Not if you’re not coming.”
“You can trust Nathan.” Her eyes shot over my shoulder and rested on him. “You’re in good hands with him. You always have been.”
“Gran?” This time it was Nathan. He entered the small intimate space Gran and I shared, and stood beside me, close enough that our shoulders grazed. I resisted the urge to jerk my arm away. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. That and he made me feel...secure, safer just by standing beside me. Why did he have to have that effect on me?
Why did he have to be a jerk?
Gran turned her eyes, gleaming with stubborn determination, to him. “More will be coming.”
“I know,” he returned quickly. “That’s why we have to go now.”
“Oh, Nathan,” she groaned. “I’m retired. I’m old, I’m worn-out. I’ll only slow you down.”
“No…” He started to protest and, for once, I agreed with him.
Gran shut him down with a fierce glare and a sharp shake of her head. The look on her face was a warning I recognized. Next would come a tongue-lashing on not disrespecting your elders if he kept it up. I had heard that lecture a few times, and recognized the signs of it coming. Nathan had apparently learned what that look meant too. He shut his mouth with a reluctant sigh.
Gran cupped my face in her hands tenderly, but spoke to Nathan. “She’s important, that much is clear.”
She couldn’t be talking about me, could she? I glanced behind her and caught Nathan’s gaze as he surveyed me like I was a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Finally, he seemed to have reached some conclusion about me, though I was sure I would never know what it was. He didn’t strike me as the sharing type.
When he finally released me from the visual hold he had on me to address Gran, I nearly sighed in relief. “Do you have—”
“Of course I do,” she interrupted, sounding displeased with his uncertainty. Without another word, she turned and descended the steps to the lowest level of the house. For what, only Gran knew. I wondered if Nathan was as confused as I was.
“You think there are more of those guys coming here?” I asked him in a hushed voice.
He nodded without looking at me.
“She has to come with us then. You have to make her come.”
He turned to me. “You ever try to make her do something she doesn’t want to do?”
I refused to let him know he had a good point. “Well, she can’t stay here…”
“Of course I can, dear,” Gran called from the bottom of the stairs.
Nathan and I watched as Gran ascended with an armful of weapons. The sight of her small frame carrying such a large stack of guns and ammunition—so many that most of her head was obstructed from my view—was almost comical. We stepped back to let her by, and she gently set the stack down on the couch. She handed a silver pistol to Nathan.
He inspected it, opened the thing where the bullets were kept, and closed it again with a snap of his wrist. He seemed to know what he was doing, like he has been doing it for a long time. A memory of him, looking exactly as he did now, fourteen years ago, flashed into my head. He has been doing it for a long time. Only I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, aside from rescuing me.
“I’ve got plenty here,” Gran said to him. “You take that one. It’s got coated bullets.”
Gran laid a box of ammunition in Nathan’s free hand. Coated bullets. Whatever that meant.
He surveyed the rest of the arsenal on the couch. “I still think you should come with us.”
Gran pursed her lips, hands on hips. She didn’t need to say anything. Nathan got the body language clearly. As did I.
Gran was not coming with us.
CHAPTER 6
The town limits of Boone disappeared behind us as we sped toward the Tennessee state line. Nathan watched every approaching car suspiciously, but not one of them turned to follow us. The farther we got from Boone, the number of cars on the road dwindled. I watched in the side mirror until the last set of headlights disappeared from sight.
Only then did the stiffness in my muscles slowly abate.
Nathan’s fist slammed down on the steering wheel, and he let loose a series of words that would put a sailor to shame. My muscles involuntarily tensed again, and I peeked at him from under my lashes. He brushed the same hand through his hair before he returned it to the wheel. It shook as he forced himself to not take his frustration out on the Jeep again.
He looked as stressed as I felt.
Neither of us had wanted to leave Gran. My mind swirled with all the potential consequences of her decision. Before we left, she had said goodbye to each of us, and it had felt so...final. My travelling buddy wasn’t the warm and fuzzy type, so when the tears welled up in my eyes, I brushed them away hastily so that he didn’t see.
He sighed loudly and, for a second, I feared he had seen me. When I glanced at him, he cursed again, quietly, sadly, under his breath. I could tell Gran was important to him, and he had reached the same difficult conclusion I had.
I opened my mouth a few times before I got up the nerve to speak. Even then, I kept my voice low so that he didn’t hear the quaver in it. “Why did she insist on staying behind?”
He kept his eyes on the road when he answered. “To give us a head start.”
“From who?”
He glanced at me, but didn’t answer, choosing instead to focus on the road.
Where we were going, I didn’t know. Following one back road after another, we wound our way farther up the mountain, and farther from any civilization I knew. Nathan seemed to know the roads well and took the turns swiftly, automatically. We moved from winding double yellow line roads, to roads with no lines, to roads that didn’t look wide enough for two lanes of traffic—not that there was any—to a dark ominous road that I doubted had seen another vehicle in a long time. The only sound came from the tires as they crunched over the gravel.
I glanced at Nathan, assuming he knew where he was going, but wary. I doubted he had saved me, only to drive me out here to get rid of me, though, if that were his plan, he had chosen the ideal location. There was no one out here besides us. Still, his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror a few times. It could have been habit. Paranoia? Or we were still in danger of being followed?
I didn’t bother to ask. I knew I wouldn’t get an answer.
After another ten minutes, he turned onto a rough dirt road that I wasn’t convinced was an actual road from the looks of it. I glanced at him nervously. He was as calm as could be, at least as far as the driving was concerned.
The Jeep bounced over the washed out crevices and small boulders in its path. He knew the way well, knew where some of the harder to navigate areas were, and how to get around them. Now I understood why he drove a Jeep. Anything else would have rolled off the side of the mountain by now. At least it was dark, and I couldn’t see the severity of the drop-off outside my window.
It wasn’t until the road leveled out, and a wide clearing appeared ahead in the headlights that I realized how tense I was. Seeing the signs of this trip coming to an end, I leaned back in my seat in relief.
The Jeep came to a stop in front of a small cabin. Nathan got out without a word to me, jogged to the front door, and slipped inside. I sat in my seat, wondering if I was supposed to follow. He wasn’t very clear with instructions.
A light came on in the cabin and I climbed out of the Jeep. Rubbing my arms to fend off the chill, I watched the door and waited. And waited.
He couldn’t have given me some clue as to what I was supposed to do?
I sighed in annoyanc
e and made it halfway to the cabin when he appeared in the doorway. He flicked the light off behind him and walked toward me, his arms full of clothes and water bottles. He had changed into blood-free jeans and a clean grey hoodie.
“Can you fit some of this in your bag?”
His unexpected politeness caught me off guard. “Yeah,” I muttered and scurried back to the Jeep with him on my heels.
“Here. You’re going to need this.” He handed me a second grey hoodie. It was enormous on me, but warm, and I was more gracious than I let on as I slipped it over my head. His masculine rustic smell—with a touch of something minty—enveloped me. Aftershave perhaps? He didn’t strike me as an expensive cologne kind of guy.
He handed me the rest of his clothes. “I’ll be right back.”
I stuffed his clothes into the bag with mine as he rounded the corner of the cabin, out of sight. He returned a moment later, carrying two rolled up sleeping bags and a small cylinder container with the picture of a tent on the front of it, and threw it all in the back of the Jeep.
It seemed we were going camping now. In thirty degree temperatures. Great.
He withdrew something from the back of the Jeep—a gun holster I thought it was called—and put it around his waist, where he secured the gun Gran had given him and the fancy-looking knife. Considering my knowledge base on this sort of stuff came exclusively from what I have gathered from movies and television, I was fascinated as I watched him, and mesmerized at how routine it all seemed to him.
He lifted the floor in the back of the Jeep to reveal a clever hiding place for more guns and ammunition. A lot more guns, I noticed as I leaned forward curiously. There was an arsenal of three small handguns and four large rifles, or shotguns, or whatever they were called. He grabbed the guns one at a time and checked that they had bullets. Instead of covering them when he was done, he glanced at me.
“You ever shoot a gun?” He didn’t look surprised when I shook my head. He hesitated, then picked up one of the small ones and turned it toward me. “Hopefully you won’t have to.”
