Liz stopped at the foot of the steps, two feet below her. “What?”
Dee breathless, lightheaded.
“Isn’t there a safer place you can put us?”
“Mathias wants you here, so you stay here. Now go back inside or I’ll f**k you up a little.”
Dee wasn’t sure if Liz would even notice in the starlight, but she suddenly diverted her eyes toward the woods, let her brow scrunch into a subtle furrow. In the time it took Liz to glance back at whatever she thought Dee had seen, Dee drew the Glock from the parka pocket, had it waiting when Liz looked back, aimed down at her face.
Liz’s eyes went wide and she said, “Cunt.”
Dee pulled the trigger.
Liz dropped like she’d been poured out of a glass. Dee stood frozen, staring down at her, awestruck. How short the distance from life and thought to a sprawled shell in the grass. Knew she could have stood there all night trying to wrap her head around it and been no closer at sunrise. No closer forty years from now, or whenever the end of her days might come.
A spark flared across the field in the trees, the report right on its heels. Other muzzleflashes erupting in the forest like lightning bugs and the night filling with gunshots and men yelling.
She hurried back into the cabin, found her children still hiding behind the bed just like she’d told them.
“Time to leave, guys.”
Movement everywhere—shadows running through the dark and voices broken by sporadic shots. As she led her children around the side of the cabin, a distant burst of machinegun fire shredded the front door.
“Stay with me,” she said, grabbing Cole’s hand and pulling him toward the woods. Naomi ran alongside them. Fifty yards to cover and they were passing people in pajamas who’d just stumbled groggy-eyed out of their shacks, some loading rifles or shotguns.
They reached the woods and Dee dragged Naomi and Cole down into the leaves.
From where she lay, it looked like chaos.
Clusters of gunfire blazing back and forth.
Muzzleflashes in the guard towers.
No apparent order.
Just people trying to kill each other and not be killed themselves.
“You guys ready?”
“Where are we going?” Naomi asked.
Dee stood. “Just come on.” She put the Glock in her parka. “Give me your hands.”
They jogged through the woods.
Somewhere in the clearing, a woman screamed.
“Why did they just yell like that?” Cole asked.
“It doesn’t matter. We have to keep running.”
They worked their way through the trees and around the clearing as the firefight intensified.
A hail of bullets eviscerated a spruce tree three steps ahead.
Dee forced her children to the ground and lay on top of them.
“Anybody hit?”
“No.”
“No.”
“There’s a hole just ahead. Crawl into it. Go. Now.”
They scrabbled the last few feet through the leaves and then rolled down an embankment. With starlight barely straggling through the crowns of the trees, it was almost pitch-black in their hole, which was really more of a depression, two feet below the forest floor and just spacious enough to accommodate the three of them. Dee sweated under her clothes from the exertion, but as her heart began to slow, she knew the chill would come. She pulled her children into her and shoveled as many leaves as she could on top of them.
“We have to be quiet now,” she said.
“For how long?” Cole asked.
“Until the shooting stops.”
It went on all night, broken occasionally by spates of silence. Sometimes, there were footfalls in the leaves nearby, and once Dee glimpsed two shadows run past the edge of their depression.
Just before dawn, the shooting stopped. After a while, a chorus of weeping and pleading started up, rising toward a crescendo that was promptly smothered under twenty-five shots that rang out in tandem from what sounded like a pair of small-caliber handguns.
* * * * *
BY dawn, an eerie silence had settled over the clearing and the woods. The sky was lightening through the trees, and though her children snored quietly, Dee hadn’t slept all night. Carefully, she withdrew her arms from under Cole’s and Naomi’s necks and turned over in the frosted leaves and crawled up to the lip of the embankment.
Gunsmoke hovered over the clearing like a dirty mist. From ten yards back in the trees, she had a decent view of the soldiers. Counted at least twenty of them milling around in the grass, sometimes squatting down to confirm the dead were really dead.
There were bodies everywhere in the clearing, and over by the mess hall, two dozen or more lay toppled in a row—women and children.
She backed down into the hole.
Naomi stirred. Her eyes opened. Dee brought her finger to her lips.
They didn’t venture out of the hole. Kept hidden instead down in the leaves, listening and sometimes watching the soldiers in the clearing. At midday, a commotion pulled Dee back up to the forest floor. She saw Mathias running through the field, chased by a group of soldiers, one of whom stopped, drew a sidearm, and sighted him up.
Mathias fell concurrently with the pistol report, cried out, and amid the fading echoes of the gunshot, Dee could hear the soldiers laughing.
Someone said, “Nice shot, Jed.”
She watched them approach, others coming over now. Surrounding Mathias at the back of a little cabin, fifty or sixty yards away.
“What hole did this rat crawl out of?”
“There’s a trapdoor in the ground back there, camouflaged with grass.”
“Anyone else in there?”
“Just big enough for him.”
Mathias was still crying, and someone said, “You’re only shot in the ass. Shut the f**k up until we give you something to cry about.”
And they did. All afternoon and into the evening, they did. The screams of Mathias blaring through the woods in between bouts of what Dee could only hope was unconsciousness. She didn’t trust Cole’s curiosity, so she held the boy to her chest and covered his ears herself, part of her dying to know what was happening out there, figuring her imagination had invented something infinitely worse than the truth. The other part trying to force her thoughts elsewhere—to a memory or a fantasy—but when the raw and blistering screech of human agony filled the clearing, there was no way to avert her mind from it or to keep from attempting to picture what they must be doing to him.
As darkness fell, light flickered off the trees above them and streamers of sweet smoke drifted into the woods. For three minutes, Mathias screamed louder than he had all day, and then at last, went silent.