Into the Fire

by Kyla Stone

  She’d known this was a possibility, feared that Ezra would turn her away and send them all packing. She wasn’t stupid. She knew Ezra’s stubbornness better than anyone.

  Besides, he was right. He had every right to be furious. She’d left first. She’d taken Eden and fled without a backward glance. She’d never written him or tried to contact him. To him, she and Eden had disappeared without a trace.

  “We’re very sorry to have intruded,” Julio said quickly, acting as the peacemaker, like always. “We don’t wish to be a burden on you.”

  “Well, you already are.”

  “Let me get the first aid kit,” Dakota said, practically begging him. “You’re hurt. Let me help you take care of your hand, at least.”

  “I don’t need your help,” Ezra growled.

  “They broke two of your fingers!” And they would’ve kept going until they’d completely broken him—fingers, hands, arms, legs—and his spirit.

  Only after hours of torture would they have finally put a bullet in his brain. Or maybe they would’ve left him there to bleed out on his own living room floor.

  Ezra gave a brusque shrug. “Not my trigger finger. That’s all that matters.”

  “Do you want me to—”

  “I want you to go.”

  She felt like crying, like curling into an exhausted ball and weeping until there was nothing left inside her—no more pain and grief and regret, just nothing.

  After all the suffering and sacrifice to get here, to get home, and she wasn’t welcome. She was homeless. Without Ezra, without this place as her anchor, she was an orphan again: parentless, unmoored in a chaotic world where danger and death lay in wait around every corner.

  “Ezra…” She didn’t know what to say. She had nothing to say in her own defense.

  “Just go!”

  A shuffling noise came from behind her as someone else entered the cabin.

  Ezra’s eyes widened as he looked over her shoulder. “Eden.”

  Dakota half-turned to take in her little sister. Her golden curls were tangled around her shoulders, her clothes dirty, her face still smudged with mud she hadn’t fully wiped off, a couple of scratches from thorns marring her arms.

  But none of that mattered. She was as beautiful as always, with a round, full face featuring a snub nose, rose-bud lips, and big blue eyes.

  She smiled shyly, held up her new notebook, and showed Ezra one of her drawings—a vivid sketch of a heron caught in midflight over a sea of sawgrass, the sun setting behind it. Ezra had always loved her drawings; he’d told Dakota once how they’d reminded him of his late wife’s wildlife photographs that adorned every wall of his home.

  His stony expression shifted, an almost imperceptible softening. She knew that look, knew him. He might be ornery and bitter enough to kick out Dakota and her friends, but he’d never force Eden to leave.

  “We don’t have anywhere else to go.” She hated herself for begging, for showing weakness when they both despised it, but she didn’t have any other choice. The world was falling down around them—this was the only sanctuary she knew.

  “Why don’t you two talk privately for a bit,” Julio said briskly. “You have a lot of catching up to do. We’ll just be waiting outside.”

  Logan threw her a sharp glance, clearly hesitant to leave her here by herself, but she shook her head. Julio had good instincts. Her best chance at reaching Ezra was with him alone. He’d never let his guard down with strangers invading his house.

  Logan set his jaw, but he turned and followed Julio, Eden, and Park out of the cabin. “Stay on the driveway,” she called after them. “Don’t wander around.”

  The door shut behind them with an awful finality. A lone fan spun from the ceiling. An electric fan whirred and rattled in the corner. There was no A/C, but the thick concrete block construction kept the heat from being oppressive.

  The room still felt oppressive. She waited, her nerves on edge.

  Haltingly, Ezra opened the fridge, dumped ice into a plastic bag, and wrapped it with a strip of cheesecloth. She longed to jump in and help him, but he wouldn’t accept it. It’d only make him more irritated.

  He held the ice gingerly against his broken fingers and turned to face her. “You have ten minutes. Talk.”

  6

  Dakota

  “We just saved your life,” Dakota said again.

  She stood in the center of the cabin, hands balled into fists on her hips, staring down Ezra with as much fire and grit as he threw back at her. She could be just as stubborn as he was.

  “I’m plenty capable of taking care of myself,” he growled.

  “You were tied up! They were torturing you. They would have killed you.”

  Ezra grimaced. “I had it handled. They…took me by surprise, is all.”

  Two years ago, no one would’ve taken Ezra Burrows by surprise.

  In her memories, Ezra was a grizzled mountain of a man, unhampered by age. Here in front of her, he seemed fragile—and old. He was still broad-shouldered, but those shoulders were stooped, his wizened leathery face lined with a network of wrinkles, more white than gray in his bristly beard.

  He must be well north of seventy, maybe closer to eighty. She didn’t really know. Was it just time that had stripped him of his vitality, or something else?

  You broke something irreparable when you left him, a voice whispered in the back of her mind.

  Guilt pricked her. She shoved it away.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “You’re alive. But Ezra, they’re going to come back. You know they are. We just killed seven Shepherds. The Prophet won’t let that go. You can’t protect this place against a dozen armed fighters. Let us help you.”

  He snorted as he sank into one of the hard wooden chairs at the kitchen table. “Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing. Trying to turn this around like you’re doin’ me a favor when it’s you should be begging on your knees for scraps.”

  She couldn’t sit down at the table next to him. She was too nervous. She unballed her fists and held out her hands, beseeching. “You want me to beg? I’ll do it. For Eden, I will.”

  His gaze dropped at the mention of Eden.

  “You’re right. We came here looking for help. Miami is chaos. And it’s spreading. Nowhere is safe. Nowhere but here.”

  “What makes you think this is your home anymore?”

  She winced. “I deserve that. I deserve all the anger and resentment you want to throw at me, old man. But Eden doesn’t. Those people out there don’t. I know you don’t know them, but they’re good people. Logan saved my life, and I’ve saved his. Julio rescued Eden and saved all our asses. Park’s willing to pitch in wherever he can.”

  “You wanted to leave, girl, you could’ve said so at any time. I wasn’t keepin’ you here against your will.”

  Dakota sucked in her breath. Here it was. “You’re angry because we ran.”

  He just stared at her, eyes steely. No matter how his body had changed, his gaze was as intelligent as ever, still as sharp and penetrating.

  “We didn’t want to leave,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “We had no choice. That day we went shopping for clothes for Eden…you were getting supplies from the tractor and feed store. We came out of the store and he was right there in the street, Ezra. Maddox Cage. He was about to go into some bank, but for some reason, he turned and stared straight at me.

  “I—I was terrified. I knew what they would do if they got Eden back, what they would do to me—” she shivered involuntarily, the scars riddling her back burning. “If they saw you, they would know. They would come after you, too.

  “I didn’t know what else to do. I grabbed Eden’s hand and we ran. We just ran and ran. For hours, maybe. I don’t know. We hitched a ride to Miami with a trucker who didn’t look like a perv. I still had the knife you gave me. I knew I could defend us.

  “Once we got to Miami, everything was different. There were so many people. Everything was so lou
d and crazy after so long in the Glades; it was overwhelming. I didn’t know how to get us food or a safe place to stay.

  “I found us one of those teen emergency shelter places, but they were overfilled so often that we had to sleep on the streets sometimes. Eden would sleep and I would stay up all night, holding my knife so hard my hand would ache in the morning, my eyes so gritty and tired. But I couldn’t let my guard down for a second.”

  She took a breath, stared hard at the nicks in the old table so she wouldn’t have to meet the judgment in those eyes. “I wanted to contact you so many times. I—I was ashamed. Because we just took off without saying goodbye after everything you’d done for us…I hated Miami and hated that we were scared and homeless, and I didn’t want you to see us—me—like that. And because I knew we couldn’t go back to you, no matter how much I wanted to.”

  She waved her hand without looking at him. “Because of this. They would find out you’d harbored us eventually. Then they’d kill you. I was selfish for letting us stay as long as we did. I put you in danger.”

  There was a long silence. The clock on the wall tick, tick, ticked. She could hear the hum of the cicadas outside, the night sounds of the creatures and insects that called the Glades home.

  “You should have told me,” he said finally.

  “I know.”

  He sighed, let out a curse, and banged the table with his good fist. “I don’t have room for five additional people.”

  “Eden and I can sleep in the ham shack room like we used to. The others can sleep on the couch and the floor—”

  “They’re not sleeping in this house.”

  “Yes, they are. They can sleep on the couch and roll out a few sleeping bags. They won’t get in the way.”

  He rubbed his grizzled chin and sighed. “One night. That’s all.”

  Something released inside her. She felt her chest expand. She took her first full breath in what felt like weeks.

  He hadn’t forgiven her, she was sure of that. But he was letting them stay the night. It was a start. She could wear him down from there.

  “I’ll take care of the extra blankets and the sleeping bags,” she said.

  “No, I will.”

  She rolled her eyes. “With that hand? Let me get the first aid kit. We need to splint it.”

  He stared at her. “You remember what to do?”

  “You taught me, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t smile, but at least he wasn’t scowling.

  “You really need a hospital, but that’s out of the question right now.”

  “I heard as much over the ham. Things as bad as they’re sayin’?”

  “Worse. Entire cities are burning. Everything is falling apart. Miami was…hell. There’s no other way to describe it.”

  He nodded to himself, like he’d been expecting the end of the world all along. Of course, he had. That was who he was.

  “I’ll fix up your face and your hand. And get you some antibiotics. You still have that fish amoxicillin, right? Then we’ll figure out what we need to do about the Shepherds. Be as furious at me as you want, but they’re a threat we can’t ignore. They want Eden. They want to kill the both of us, too.”

  Ezra removed the icepack and glanced down at his ruined fingers with furrowed brows. He gave a heavy, resigned sigh. “I reckon so. Solomon isn’t a man who accepts defeat.”

  A shiver of dread ran up her spine. “Neither is his son.”

  7

  Logan

  “What do you think’s going on in there?” Park asked.

  “Who knows?” Logan kicked a stray chunk of rock on the gravel road and rubbed the back of his neck. The sling of the AR-15 dug into his shoulder.

  A dull ache radiated from his skull down his spine: whiplash from the insane car chase earlier that night. His muscles were weak and trembling. His entire body was one big bruise. He was drained and exhausted, and the night wasn’t over yet.

  The radiation sickness symptoms had mostly receded, but they’d return with a vengeance in a few weeks. It was a strange and disconcerting thing, to know you were sick but couldn’t feel it. Like a cancer, a rot just beneath the surface of things.

  As they walked, Eden and Julio shone their penlights a few feet ahead of the group. After several minutes of waiting for Ezra and Dakota to determine their fate, they’d all decided to walk the two miles or so back to the truck hidden in the underbrush.

  This time, they could simply use the road instead of taking the long way through the dense woods.

  They’d just saved the crazy coot, and he wasn’t just ungrateful—he radiated rancor and indignation, like they were the intruders.

  Logan already disliked him intensely.

  Dakota had sold him on the cabin safehouse, hook, line, and sinker. He hadn’t stopped to think whether the old hermit would accept them. Dakota was convincing, if nothing else.

  He wanted to be angry at her, but he couldn’t. Either one of them could’ve died tonight. He was just grateful they were both still alive.

  Somehow in their struggle to survive, stumbling from one near-death disaster to the next, he had connected to this tough, smart-mouthed girl. It was a thin and tremulous thing, something that might break if he looked at it straight on.

  So he did what he did best: he ignored it completely.

  “Dakota will get it sorted out,” Julio said.

  Logan only grunted. From his end, things didn’t look too great. “We can always sleep in the back of the truck, I guess.”

  Park slapped at several mosquitos buzzing around his face. “And get eaten alive by bugs? No thanks.”

  “How are you doing?” Julio asked Eden. “Are you holding up okay?”

  She gave a small shrug of her shoulders but kept her head down and focused on the road in front of her. She looked so small and young and vulnerable. Her eyes were wide and scared, like a rabbit’s. Like prey.

  Some people were always the victims. Good and kind but too trusting, too easily manipulated, too weak to do the hard stuff.

  She was lucky as hell she had Dakota.

  “It’s almost over,” Julio promised the girl. He gave her a comforting pat on the arm. “You’ll be sleeping in a cozy bed tonight.”

  Logan had his doubts, but he kept them to himself.

  Though it was the middle of the night, the temperature had to be over ninety degrees, the muggy air like a furnace. Logan wiped sweat from his forehead and swatted away a swarm of bugs.

  He hated the swamp.

  Trees towered on both sides of the road, steeped in shadows. He hated not being able to see clearly, hated all the darkness. The strange, eerie forest sounds had him twitchy and on edge.

  Every rustle, every scrape and scratch and breaking twig had his heart jolting, his hand reaching for his rifle. He felt the comforting press of the Glock’s concealed holster at his back. At least he was armed.

  “You ever been out here?” Park asked him.

  Logan was a city boy, through and through. First in Richmond, Virginia where he’d grown up, then Miami after his stint in prison. The Everglades was a protected national treasure, but to him, it was a waste of space—just an endless boggy marsh to get lost in, a glorified swamp bursting with venomous snakes, giant toothy lizards, and other creatures who wanted to eat you.

  Logan shook his head. “What for?”

  Park snorted. “I prefer the beaches, myself.”

  Something crunched in the woods. A dozen yards to the right, leaves rustled and shifted.

  Logan whirled around, heart thumping double time, and peered into the darkness. “What was that?”

  His eyes couldn’t make out anything more than dim, indistinct shapes, a few trembling leaves. The shadows were deep and thick, his brain automatically imagining the lurking forms of predators and enemies.

  “Just an animal,” Park said, but there was a nervous tremble in his voice.

  “Racoons, probably,” Julio said.

  Logan kept his eyes o
n the spaces between the trees. “It was something big.”

  “A boar, maybe? I think there’s some in the wild out here.”

  Logan unslung the rifle, snicked off the safety, and gripped it in both hands. No way was he getting taken out by something as lame as an oversized pig.

  Not after surviving a nuclear bomb.

  “Walk faster,” he said brusquely.

  Park chuckled. “I guess it’s nice to know you’re capable of fear, just like the rest of us.”

  “I’m not afraid,” he insisted.

  “Uh huh. Sure thing, buddy.”

  “Don’t call me buddy.”

  Eden tugged on Julio’s arm. She pointed the penlight ahead at an indistinct shape looming out of the darkness along the road forty feet in front of them.

  “Is that a car?” Julio shone the pen flashlight ahead as a black Mitsubishi parked along the curb slowly materialized.

  “They were probably fleeing the city and turned up this road for help, is my guess,” Park said. “Maybe they ran out of gas, like all the other cars we passed.”

  Eden shook her head and pulled harder on Julio’s arm. She huffed loudly to get their attention and jabbed the air with the penlight.

  Logan paused and glanced at her. “What is it?”

  She gestured emphatically at the car again.

  “Wait—” Julio said, “is that someone in the driver’s seat?”

  Park took a faltering step backward, nearly bumping into Julio. “What if it’s another Shepherd? A lookout or something?”

  Logan tensed. “Everyone, stay here. I’ll find out.”

  8

  Logan

  With his rifle at the ready, Logan inched around the rear of the car, past the rear door to the driver’s side door. “Don’t move!”

  The figure didn’t move.

  Logan waited, his mouth dry, pulse thudding in his throat.

  Still, the figure didn’t move. Logan caught a whiff of something rancid. He made out the shadowy form of slumped shoulders, a head leaning back against the seat.