Into the Fire

by Kyla Stone

  Rain plastered her hair to her temples and dripped down her face. Her clothes were soaked almost instantly and stuck to her skin. She forced herself to focus despite the ache throbbing in her chest.

  Logan is gone.

  It didn’t make sense.

  They’d won. Against all odds, they’d defended the cabin and defeated the Shepherds. Their allies had come to their aid. Maddox Cage, her nemesis, was dead.

  With over two dozen Shepherds lost, the Prophet would think twice about attacking them again. He would slink away in defeat. She was sure of it.

  She wanted it to be true so badly that she already half-believed it was.

  Their victory had cost them. The cabin was in tatters. Park was dead. But she still had the people that mattered most. It was selfish and ugly, but it was the truth.

  She should feel elated, jubilant, on top of the freaking world. At least for tonight. They should’ve had time to celebrate, to acknowledge how close they’d come to losing everything.

  She and Logan should’ve…

  But she couldn’t finish the thought. It was too painful.

  There was no ‘she and Logan’, not anymore. Because Logan had chosen to leave.

  She knelt to examine the fourth and fifth bodies, shining her penlight into their faces, blinking against the water in her eyelashes. Some of the dead were rough, their heads, torsos, and limbs riddled with buckshot and bullet holes. Some lay flat on their stomachs, and she had to kick them onto their backs.

  She counted each one, carefully studying their features. They looked almost alien in death, bloodied and bloated, their NV goggles distorting their faces.

  Some she recognized; some she didn’t.

  She rose and continued her search. Seven, eight, nine. Still no Maddox.

  After all of this, after all she and Logan had been through, he’d chickened out in the end. Not from an unwinnable fight, not from a battle where he was outmanned and outgunned—but from mere human connection.

  Dakota knew better than anyone how much connection could cost a person. How something so simple and easy for some people could be an insurmountable mountain for someone else.

  He still blamed himself. He thought what he’d done marked him for life, made him unworthy of a chance at happiness.

  He was dead wrong.

  She should go after him, after she saw to Ezra and Eden. She should—

  But no. He’d made his choice. She wouldn’t beg. Besides, he’d taken Boyd’s motorcycle. He was already long gone.

  She forced herself to shove those painful thoughts down deep. Later, she’d grieve for what might have been. Right now, she had responsibilities. She had people who were depending on her.

  Ten, eleven, twelve. Anxiety twisted in her gut as the count grew higher and higher.

  She was in sight of the storage shed. The fighting hadn’t been heavy here. There were fewer bodies.

  Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. None of them Maddox.

  Her breath hitched in her throat. Dread coiled in her gut, tighter and tighter.

  Maddox wasn’t here. If he wasn’t here among the bodies, then he wasn’t dead.

  And if he wasn’t dead, then where had he gone? He wouldn’t have left the battle at the cabin without a reason, without a purpose…

  Unless…

  Unless he knew Eden was no longer inside.

  She raced for the shed, her legs like pistons, terror pumping through her veins. The wavering penlight highlighted the rain, the dead, the slick black grass.

  She banged on the slick metal door. “Ezra! Eden! It’s me! Let me in!”

  No one answered.

  She lifted her fist to bang again and froze. On the door right in front of her, about chest high—a red, palm-sized smudge, streaked by the rain. A handprint terminating in a long, bloodied smear.

  Please, no. No, no, no!

  “Let me in!” she shouted.

  She gripped the wet handle. It turned beneath her fingers.

  It wasn’t locked.

  Panic clawed at her. Her lungs constricted. For a moment, she couldn’t suck in a breath, couldn’t call out, couldn’t do anything.

  The rain pelted her. The wind whipped her hair, her clothes. She forced herself to turn the handle and push. The door swung open. The shed light spilled out in a dim halo.

  Dread pooling in her gut, she took in the interior of the shed, spanning the neatly stacked shelves full of years’ worth of preparations, the single bulb hanging from the ceiling, the cement floor smeared with a trail of more blood.

  Eden wasn’t there.

  Just beyond the door, Ezra lay in a crumpled, bloodied heap.

  70

  Dakota

  It was like falling into freezing water. The absolute shock of it. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move.

  “Dakota,” Ezra said hoarsely.

  The sound of his voice snapped her out of it. She staggered inside and collapsed to her knees on the floor beside Ezra. With the penlight clenched between her teeth, she pushed aside his plaid overshirt.

  The white T-shirt beneath was drenched with blood. She jerked it up with clumsy fingers, searching frantically for the wound.

  “You’re okay,” she said, “you’re gonna be okay.”

  Ezra took in a ragged, gasping breath. He looked up at her, defeat in his eyes. “Not…this time.”

  She lifted the soaked fabric from his chest, blood slicking her hands. He’d been shot twice—once in the upper right shoulder, and once in the center of his chest.

  His shoulder was packed with QuikClot gauze and didn’t look like it was bleeding much. It was the chest wound that sent panic jolting through her veins.

  Blood pumped from the hole, the edges a foamy pink. The hole made a horrible sucking sound as he struggled to breath.

  The bullet had punctured his lungs.

  Dakota’s heart plummeted. The panic threatened to crush her. The shoulder could heal, but the chest wound was nothing Haasi’s poultices could fix. He needed trauma doctors, an ER, emergency surgery.

  They were in the middle of a million acres of swampland, hours from the nearest hospital. And even if that hospital was operational, it’d be overwhelmed with bomb victims.

  There was no 911 to call, no ambulance on its way, sirens wailing. She’d never felt so utterly isolated.

  “No,” she moaned. “No, no, no!”

  “Eden, she…They took her.”

  Dakota barely registered the words. She’d known the second she’d opened the door and Eden was gone. It was too horrific to take in. Her brain wouldn’t accept it, not with Ezra bleeding out right in front of her.

  “I was wrong,” he said.

  She rocked back on her heels, shaking her head in helpless despair. “Don’t say that.”

  “We should’ve worked with the others. I should’ve asked for…help.”

  “Not now. This isn’t the time.”

  He ignored her. “I made mistakes.”

  “We have to—”

  “Dakota.” He gripped her bloody hand in his weak, gnarled one. “I’m dying.”

  “No!” She didn’t accept it. She refused.

  He coughed. Blood speckled his thin bluish lips. “Dakota—”

  “I said no!” She shook him off, found a clean stack of folded towels on a nearby shelf, and pressed one against the wound to apply pressure. “Don’t talk like that. You’re too ornery to die. You can’t die. Hold this here while I find something to help you.”

  “Dakota, it won’t matter—”

  “Just do it!” She yanked his hands up and placed them over the towel, pressing hers over his. “Do it.”

  His eyes flashed—a glimmer of his stubbornness shimmering through the pain—but he obeyed.

  She had to keep it together, had to think. She struggled to recall his lessons from so long ago. “You have a sucking chest wound. If we don’t seal it, the lung will collapse.”

  And after that, worse things happened,
like coma and death.

  If only Shay were here. She knew so much more than Dakota. She’d know all about restricted blood vessels, decreased blood flow, how to prevent shock. With her calm and practiced hands, she’d do a better job, too.

  But Shay wasn’t here. Haasi wasn’t here. It was up to Dakota to save him.

  “We need a plastic Ziplock bag, right? Or a credit card?” She searched the shelves frantically for the medicinal section, scanning the neat, orderly rows of canned vegetables, fruits, and beans; the sealed containers labeled with oats, flour, and other grains; the water purification tablets and jugs of bleach; the matches, batteries, and boxes of ammunition.

  There it was, near the top center of the right side, the white label inscribed with his elegant, impeccable handwriting. She leapt up, fumbled for a pair of sterile gloves.

  She searched for the large gauze pads and the QuikClot combat gauze to stop the bleeding, knocking over boxes of bandages and bottles of pills as she grabbed a roll of medical tape, too.

  She dropped them beside Ezra and turned to kitchen supplies, found the neatly labeled plastic bin, and yanked it off the shelf. It fell to the floor with a thud. She already had the cover off, tossing out aluminum foil and trash bag boxes until she found the Ziplock stack.

  Ezra didn’t yell at her for making a mess of his precise, systematic storage. Her throat tightened. At that moment, she would’ve given anything for a stern lecture. But the only sound was the wet hiss and rattle of his breathing.

  She returned to him, blinking back the sudden wetness as she sank to her knees. She ripped open the gauze and used it to wipe the blood from the wound. It was useless. There was too much. It was everywhere—slick on his skin, his clothes, her gloved hands, the floor.

  “Breathe out as much as you can.”

  Too weak to fight her, he complied.

  When he’d exhaled as much excess air as he could, she placed the Ziplock bag over the bullet hole, making sure there was at least two inches of plastic on all sides of the wound. She used several layers of medical tape to seal it on three sides, wrapping it fully around his ribs to keep it in place.

  Leaving the fourth side open created a one-way valve to let the air escape through the hole. The suction of trying to draw air into the wound would pull the dressing against it and act to seal the chest cavity, so Ezra’s lungs could expand normally.

  That was the working theory, anyway. With her luck, she’d screwed it up somehow.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Just keep breathing.”

  He closed his eyes, opened them again. “I need to tell you…I made a mistake.”

  “You shouldn’t talk.”

  He sucked in a wheezing breath. “All the things you learn on your deathbed…and no one to tell them to.”

  If she smiled, she would shatter into a million pieces. “Shut up, Ezra.”

  “You sound just like Izzy used to.”

  “Stop talking. Save your strength.”

  “Don’t be a stubborn ass like me.” His face contorted in pain—and remorse. “When Izzy passed…and then you left…”

  She understood him, understood everything he was trying to say. He’d been dead wrong, but she knew why he’d made the choices he had, maybe better than anyone. He was contrary and bull-headed. More than that, he was afraid.

  His wife’s death had broken his heart. When Dakota and Eden arrived in the dead of night, disheveled and desperate, he’d risked everything he had left to let them in.

  But then Dakota abandoned him, and what was left of his heart shattered. He couldn’t allow himself to trust again, to let anyone in—even when he knew better. Even to protect his own life.

  She’d almost made the same mistake.

  Almost.

  “Shh,” she said softly, her eyes burning. “I know.”

  “You’re better than that,” he mumbled. “You’re better than me.”

  It took everything in her not to break down sobbing.

  “You can get her back…you can end this.”

  Dakota went rigid. “Not without an army. Not without you. How could I possibly try?”

  “You don’t need me…you know how.”

  She shook her head fiercely. Her eyes burned. She didn’t cry. She was too enraged to cry.

  “You should be proud of her,” he said. “She agreed to go with them if they left without killing anyone else…and let you be. She traded herself.”

  All the oxygen was sucked out of the room. “What?”

  “She wrote it down on a piece of paper, asked me to say it to them. She said Maddox would honor it, and he did…for whatever reason, he did. It was…the bravest thing I ever saw. She was…still afraid…she did it anyway.”

  “She just went with them?” Dakota asked, stunned. Fresh rage slashed through her, mingling with the grief. For an instant, outrage blotted out everything. Bitter, disbelieving rage—and betrayal.

  Oh, Eden. No, no, no. How could she? Eden was weak. She was compliant and meek, passive and gullible. She always had been.

  Maddox stood outside that door and enticed her with honeyed lies, and she’d believed him, let herself be led astray like a lamb to the slaughter.

  And now Ezra would die for it.

  “After everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve sacrificed—”

  “No,” Ezra said. “You have it—wrong. She did it…for you.”

  She stared at him, bewildered. She couldn’t think straight. His words didn’t make sense. “What do you mean?”

  “She gave herself up…to save you, girl.”

  Dakota rocked back on her heels. “No. She got you shot—”

  “I was already…shot.” He breathed heavily, his eyelids fluttering, his face ashen. Blood soaked the cement beneath him. “It was too late for me...she did it for you.”

  Dakota was speechless. Her lungs constricted, like a giant fist was slowly squeezing, squeezing the life out of her.

  Only twenty minutes ago, she’d been triumphant. She’d thought they’d won.

  Then everything she’d worked so hard for had been ripped away in an instant. She’d lost Logan. Ezra, a man she loved like a father, was dying. She hadn’t kept Eden safe like she’d promised.

  She’d survived a cult, torture, a damn nuclear bomb. Only now did she finally feel like the whole world was collapsing around her.

  Ezra fumbled for her hand and closed his fingers around hers. “Stay…with me.”

  “Ezra, I—”

  He shook his head weakly. His skin was dead-white. His chest hardly moved. He was barely clinging to consciousness. When that slipped away, so would he. “Just…stay.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I messed up. I did everything wrong. I—”

  “No, girl. You did everything…right.”

  It would be too hard, too unbearable to say all the things she longed to say—that she was bereft beyond words, that she loved him, had loved him since that first day he found her and Eden in the shed, the day a lonely old man made the choice not to shoot two desperate little thieves, but to save them instead.

  “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Please don’t leave me.”

  He didn’t answer.

  She squeezed his hand, squeezed all the grief, sorrow, and regret into his bony fingers until the death rattle finally subsided, his hollowed eyes drifted closed, and his hand went limp in her own.

  71

  Dakota

  Dakota remained beside Ezra. She didn’t know how long she stayed, but she’d promised. She’d promised him.

  She slumped against the shelves, ignoring the ache in her shoulders and spine and the soreness of her tailbone from the concrete floor. She held Ezra’s hand and stared through the doorway out into the night and thought about nothing.

  She was numb, brittle, a breath away from shattering into pieces.

  Ten minutes passed—or maybe it was ten hours. It felt like ten lifetimes. Julio found her at her vigil, crouched over Ezra’s body,
damp and shivering. He called her name, then said it again.

  She looked at him, blinking, slowly coming back to herself. “Julio.”

  “I’m here,” he said gently, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders. “I’m right here.”

  His palms were blistered. Black dirt smudged his fingernails. She’d forgotten where he was, that he’d been busy with his own vigil, burying Park.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry…”

  “Oh, honey,” Julio said, touching her shoulder, offering her comfort. “It’s not your fault.”

  Julio asked where Logan was, but she couldn’t answer that. He tried to get her to come inside, but she wouldn’t leave Ezra.

  Together, they wrapped his body in another blanket and carried him through the wind and rain into the cabin. They passed the dead bodies and left them to rot.

  They’d have to burn Ezra’s body, she thought dimly. He’d always wanted to be cremated. Who wants to feed the worms and the maggots once they’re gone? She heard his voice, deep and grizzled and clear as if he were standing right in front of her.

  For tonight, they laid Ezra gently on the couch. Julio said a prayer over him while Dakota stood numbly in the wreckage of the cabin, staring at the blood stains on the living room floor, the dust and debris scattered everywhere. The air stank of gunpowder and death.

  Julio pulled the satphone out of his pocket, righted a tipped-over chair, and sat at the kitchen table—the scarred wooden table Ezra had built with his own hands, the table she and Eden had spent countless hours at, talking and laughing and living.

  “It’s Shay.” He stared numbly down at the phone. “She tried to call.”

  Dakota barely heard him. Sounds were tinny and far away. Her earplugs were gone, but she didn’t remember taking them out.

  Her head felt full of cotton—her heart like it’d been ripped out of her chest still beating.

  The walls were too close. The dusty air clogged her throat. One, two, three. Breathe. Everywhere she looked, she saw memories of Ezra, saw glimpses of all the things she’d had and then lost. She’d failed, utterly and completely.