Into the Fire

by Kyla Stone

  “Only five lashes,” the Prophet said. “Sister Rosemarie’s cautious nature shows wisdom.”

  Every lash struck with a burning explosion of agony. The pain radiated across his spine, his ribs, until his entire back felt like it was blazing with fire.

  He flinched but kept himself steady. He didn’t groan or cry out. He didn’t make a sound. He squeezed his eyes shut and counted each blow, his mind fixed on his goal: the moment he found Dakota, and this would all be worth it.

  When the punishment was over, his father was sweating and short of breath. He wiped the whip clean on a towel, wound it, and hung it upon the hook on the wall.

  Maddox wanted to collapse on the cool concrete and let unconsciousness take away the pain striping his back. But he didn’t.

  He climbed shakily to his feet and straightened his shoulders with a wince. “I’ll head the next mission. This is my problem. I’ll take care of it myself.”

  “Clearly, you can’t be trusted with—”

  “I know Dakota Sloane. I know the backwater channels like no one else. I’ve spent more time out there—” he pointed at the woods, but meant the outside world, “—than anyone here. I’m the man for the job.”

  Solomon gave a derisive snort.

  “We have more pressing concerns,” the Prophet said softly.

  Solomon’s eyes flashed. Nothing was more pressing to him than revenge.

  “I need you focused, Solomon. There is a bigger picture, remember? We have much to do. The physicist arrives tonight. I need you here.” He waved a hand at Maddox. “The boy has proven himself capable. Give the task to him.”

  His father would see him for the warrior he was. Maddox would make sure of it. He’d finally have the respect he deserved. The respect his father loathed to give him.

  Once the Prophet saw what he could do, his father would be forced to honor him.

  Maddox forced a smile. “Give me the men of my choice. I’ll deal with these people and get my sister back where she belongs.”

  “You have them,” the Prophet said. “I want Eden at my side by next Sunday at the latest. Everything changes then. The timing is critical. Do you understand?”

  That was seven days away. An entire week. Plenty of time for what he had planned.

  He ran a hand through his hair. Several strands came out between his fingers. He stared down at the clump of blond hairs for a moment, startled.

  It didn’t matter. The agony searing his back didn’t matter. The sores blistering his skin didn’t matter. None of it did.

  He was stronger than anything they could throw at him. He was better than Jacob, his father, Dakota—all of them.

  He would show them all.

  “It will be done,” Maddox said.

  19

  Dakota

  After everyone had helped with chores around the property and eaten a hearty dinner of fish, potatoes, and cucumber salad, Ezra called a meeting.

  Once they were all seated around the table, he brought out a framed 24-by-30-inch map of the property that Eden had drawn to exact specifications for his birthday three years ago.

  The drawing was three-dimensional, intricate, and made to scale—the cabin set in the middle of the clearing, the big antenna beside it, the storage shed, chicken coop, garden, the well and cisterns, and the haybale shooting range near the dock, the little fishing boat seeming to bob in the water.

  Eden grinned when he set it on the table and carefully squared it so each side was level. Her grin faded when he took it out of its frame and removed the glass. He pulled out a stubby pencil and marked an X across the sketched driveway and another near the cabin, ruining her pristine artwork.

  Anger flared in Dakota’s gut but quickly faded. Ezra was practical to a fault; he didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. Well, maybe a few small ones, but he ignored them most of the time.

  Their task was to keep themselves alive, not preserve art.

  Besides, Eden was right here; she could always draw another one.

  Outside, an early evening thunderstorm darkened the windows. The first splatters of rain struck the roof. With the rain came the cooling relief from the muggy heat—for a few hours. Inside the well-insulated cabin, the air was cooler, at least.

  “We need to establish a guard schedule.” Logan rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “We can break into rotating shifts, four hours each.”

  “Trip wires already surround the perimeter,” Ezra said, “with motion-sensor security lights and cameras covering all directions.”

  “We should join the neighborhood patrol group,” Dakota said. “The Collier brothers and Haasi. Together, we can monitor any intruders, whether it’s desperate refugees trying to steal or the Shepherds.”

  Ezra’s lips pressed into a thin line, his eyes flashing. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Did you hear anything I taught you, girl?”

  Dakota bristled at his condescending tone. “Of course, I did. You can’t depend on anyone to save you but yourself. I know that better than anyone.” She shot a glance at Logan. She wouldn’t have gotten here without him, of that she was certain. “But we’re outnumbered. Seems like the more eyes and hands we have, the better off we are.”

  “They’re too soft,” Ezra growled. “Too weak. They don’t know what’s out there. They think because they can skin a coon and live without modern amenities, that makes them strong enough to survive anything.”

  “Ezra—”

  “They’re wrong. Men who don’t know what they don’t know are the most dangerous kind. I don’t trust them. Come to think of it, I don’t trust any of you, either.”

  “Hey now,” Park said, defensive, “we’re not the bad guys here.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You sure about that?”

  This line of talk would only go one direction—downhill. She had to get him refocused on a task. “What about the front gate? Does it need to be fixed?”

  Ezra glared down at his broken hand resting on the table. “They ambushed me when I drove back home after a trip into town for supplies. I opened the gate, and they were right there, waiting across the road. Took me by surprise, that’s all.”

  “We can use the Shepherds’ trucks to barricade the entrance to the driveway before anyone gets to the gate, so they have to walk up,” Logan said. “The heavy treeline on either side of the property will keep a vehicle out.”

  Dakota nodded. “We can hide our truck and Ezra’s east and west along the road outside the barricade, stashed with bugout bags and jerrycans of diesel, just in case we need to escape fast.”

  Ezra grunted. “We won’t need to escape. Nowhere else is as safe as it is right here. We stand our ground.”

  Logan glanced from Ezra to Dakota, brows raised like, who is this guy?

  Dakota gave a sharp shake of her head. This wasn’t the time. “We still need to plan for all possibilities. That’s what you taught me.” She considered all the angles, thinking about her and Eden’s arrival via boat and desperate trek through the woods three years ago. “We can’t forget the swamp as a possible point of entry.”

  “Fine. We’ll patrol the north perimeter, too,” Ezra said, his voice dismissive. “But I doubt they’d attempt to navigate the maze of tributaries out there.”

  “We did it,” Dakota said.

  Ezra glanced at her, a flicker of pride in his blue eyes. “No one else knows the water like you do.”

  “Maddox does,” Dakota said firmly. “Don’t underestimate him.”

  Ezra flexed his uninjured hand and made a fist. “I’m not underestimating anything.”

  “Should the kid be here for this?” Park asked, slanting his gaze at Eden.

  “This is her life, too,” Julio said. “If she wants in, I think she should be in.”

  Dakota watched her sister carefully, half-expecting her to sigh in relief and escape as quickly as she could. Eden wasn’t the best at facing reality.

  But instead of shrinking a
way, Eden sat up in her chair and straightened her shoulders. She made the I’m okay sign and gave a resolute nod.

  “Are you sure?” Dakota asked, surprised—and impressed.

  Eden pointed to her temple and clenched her hands together in front of her stomach, mouthing the words so Dakota understood. Trust me.

  “We do,” Julio said before Dakota could say anything. “We know you’ll do your best.”

  Eden flashed him a grateful smile and signed, Thank you.

  “We’ll work Eden into the watch rotation,” Logan said.

  Eden beamed at him. He winked at her.

  Wincing, Ezra leaned down, grabbed a black duffle bag from the floor, and set it on the table, right on top of Eden’s artwork. He handed each of them a whistle to wear around their necks. “One long blast if you need help. Two short blasts if intruders are detected and we’re under attack.”

  He handed a handheld radio transceiver to Dakota, Julio, and Eden. “I only have three extra. They’ve got excellent range.”

  Dakota clipped the radio to her belt. Before they’d left Haasi’s homestead, Haasi had given her the frequency and the call signs she and the Collier brothers used for emergency communication, just in case.

  Julio motioned toward Eden. “What about her? If there’s a situation, she can’t communicate with us verbally.”

  Ezra scratched the white scruff at his jawline and frowned. He picked up the radio and flipped it over in his hands. “She could use CW, i.e. Morse code, I suppose, if she’s willing to learn.”

  Eden brightened. She nodded eagerly.

  He smiled—a genuine smile, not sarcastic or mocking. “I’ll teach you on the ham. And show you how to use it on a handheld in an emergency. But you need a call sign—a code name—so we know it’s you.”

  She scrunched her nose, thinking.

  “We can come up with code names later,” Dakota said impatiently. “What’s next?”

  Ezra pointed to the shed on the map. “If you’re not in the cabin when we’re attacked, head to the storage shed. I built it myself—same qualities as the cabin: thick, twelve-inch concrete block walls filled with poured concrete and rebar and reinforced with Amortex ballistic-resistant fiberglass panels. Fire-resistant roof. Can’t be burned out. Oxygen comes from a couple of high slit windows and a pipe from the roof. Some oxygen masks in storage, too, along with enough food and water to outlast whoever’s after you. You’ll have to poop in a bucket, but there’s wood shavings to dull the stink.”

  He glared suspiciously at the newcomers, like he’d love to kick them out then and there, but when he turned to Eden, his gaze softened. “You remember the tunnel?”

  Both Eden and Dakota nodded. Ezra had built a small escape tunnel through the crawlspace beneath the floor in case the front and back doors were ever breached. Digging holes in Florida’s shallow, porous soil was precarious business, so it only went five-or-so yards beyond the side of the house and exited beneath the only clump of bushes Ezra allowed anywhere near the cabin.

  “The trapdoor’s under the rug in the bathroom off the kitchen,” Dakota said. “You can flee to the shed bunker or past it into the woods, where there’s several caches with more guns and supplies, if they’re still there.”

  “They’re still there.” Ezra pointed out the perimeter to be defended and the weakest points where intruders were likely to attempt entry. He drew X’s to identify several tripwires, then drew straight lines between the cabin and the sheds and various outhouses.

  “The property is booby-trapped, like I told you. We’ll make more, too. Don’t go wandering around outside these lines unless you’re lookin’ to be crippled for life.”

  Park and Julio glanced at each other with raised eyebrows.

  Ezra ignored them and continued on. “Anyone turns onto the drive before the gate, an alarm picks up the magnetic field of the vehicle and sends a warning.” He explained how the alarm sent a radio signal to a small receiver. The sensor was buried in a length of PVC pipe beneath the gravel driveway which ran to a transmitter box bolted to the far side of a big oak tree so it couldn’t be seen from the road.

  “All these security measures may be enough to keep out the casual intruders,” Logan said slowly. “They’ll give up and look for easier pickings. It’s not going to be enough for these crazy fanatics after Eden.”

  Ezra shot Logan a sharp look. He didn’t like Logan, Dakota realized. They were both strong, tough, independent men. She’d hoped they’d like each other—and if not like, at least respect. But maybe that was too much to ask.

  “I’m well aware.” Ezra marked small X’s on all four sides of the cabin at the roofline. “There’s a sniper’s nest in the attic above us. I’ve got shooting positions set up to the north, south, east, and west, reinforced with sandbags. Automatic gunfire will eventually chew through concrete, so the sandbags are additional protection.

  “I’ve got a load of sand and dirt behind the shed and dozens of burlap sacks we can fill to set up shooting positions beneath each window down here. And razor wire to put around the inside of the window frames to tear up anyone’s hands who try to get inside.”

  Logan nodded. “Good.”

  “Should we board up the windows?” Park asked.

  Ezra shot Park a derisive look. “Plywood won’t stop bullets.”

  Park ducked his head like a chastised puppy.

  “What about the front door?” Julio asked.

  “It’s solid steel in a steel frame,” Ezra said. “Five single-cylinder one-inch deadbolts and strike plates. No one’s kicking their way in, that’s for sure.”

  “If someone wants in, they’re coming in.” Logan jabbed his finger at the cabin in the center of the drawing. “You can steel-reinforce your front door, but what happens when they drive an armored Humvee through your living room wall? I mean, they may not get through this particular wall, but there’s still windows.”

  Ezra gave a grudging nod. “Do what you can to deter, but prepare for the inevitable. So, funnel them where you want them. Pick your weakest point and be ready for them there, in a kill zone of your choice.”

  Logan raked a hand through his rumpled black hair. “I can get behind that.”

  “Where do we want them?” Park said. “I mean, where is this kill zone?”

  “The back door is designed to be the weakest point of entry. The narrow twelve-foot hallway forces the intruders to enter single file, funneling them into a choke point. The attic entry is at the end of the hallway before the kitchen. I’ll set up a defensive sniper position with sandbags and take them out from above. Any scumbag stupid enough to invade my home will get exactly what they deserve.”

  “Ideally, we kill them all before they reach the cabin,” Julio said. “Right?”

  “They won’t get anywhere near the cabin,” Ezra said. “They won’t get the drop on me again. Trust me.”

  Dakota shook her head. Ezra was far too confident. “We underestimate them at our peril. They’ll be furious that we killed their men. They’ll come back hot, with all the fire and fury of hell at their backs.”

  Ezra absently rubbed the palm of his injured hand, a scowl deepening the wrinkles crisscrossing his face. “And we’ll greet them with more.”

  “We have to be ready,” Dakota said, despising the anxiety creeping into her voice.

  Logan met her gaze, his expression grim. “We will be.”

  20

  Eden

  “We need to talk,” Dakota said. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her forearm and turned to face Eden. “This isn’t a good time. There’ll never be a good time. But you deserve to know the truth.”

  Eden nodded slowly. She knew what this meant. She’d been waiting for this conversation for three years.

  This morning, everyone had woken up early, ready to fortify their defenses. Dakota, Ezra, Julio, and Eden were busy shoring up the cabin while Logan and Park patrolled the perimeter. Julio and Ezra worked on the east side while Dako
ta and Eden took the west side.

  Eden knelt on the ground, already sweating at nine a.m. as she hammered long six-inch nails into thin slabs of plywood to create nail boards. Ezra had called it a punji trap, a booby trap commonly used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.

  In carefully chosen spots, Ezra and Julio were digging pits two feet deep and the width of a man’s foot. They’d already dug a few holes beneath the windows on Eden’s side.

  “This is like the opposite of baby-proofing a house, you know that, right?” Park had said with a roll of his eyes before he’d left on patrol. She couldn’t help herself; she’d laughed silently.

  She didn’t feel like laughing now. As the sweat dripped into her eyes and the heat sapped her energy, she just wanted to be done. The late-July air was hot and sticky. Clouds of tiny insects swarmed around her, no matter how often she swatted them away.

  Dakota looked even more miserable. She wore thick, puncture-resistant gloves to handle the razor wire. She was working to string the razor wire along the inside frames of all the windows, attaching the wire with a heavy-duty staple gun.

  Dakota set the staple gun on the windowsill. “If I don’t—if I don’t do it now, I’ll let myself keep putting it off.”

  Eden hammered in the last nail for the board she was working on and examined it to make sure the vicious-looking nails were perfectly straight and deadly. They were.

  With each board, she hammered in five or six spikes, then flipped the board over so the nails pointed toward the sky, fitted it in the bottom of the hole, and covered it with a paper-thin bamboo board. She replaced the top layer of grassy soil and sprinkled small twigs and leaf litter over it until it was completely camouflaged.

  No one would guess that savage spikes waited to skewer any unsuspecting intruder’s foot, puncturing through the sturdiest boot soles, deep into the flesh and bone. It wouldn’t kill the Shepherds, but it’d disable and slow them down long enough for Ezra or Dakota to shoot them.

  She forced herself not to shudder at the thought.