Threat Warning (13 page)

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Authors: John Gilstrap

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: Threat Warning
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“There’s no way I can fit through that,” Christyne said.
“I can,” Ryan said. He didn’t know how, but he also knew there was no choice. He started stripping off his jacket to make himself smaller.
“Then what?” Christyne asked.
“I’ll get help.”
It was the best he could do on the fly.
Christyne hesitated, the fear settling deeper into her features. “Suppose they see you?” she asked. “Suppose you get caught?”
He kept stripping the clothes away until he was bare-chested again. Jesus, it was cold. “What difference does it make? They beat the shit out of me just for being here. Whatever they do if I get caught can’t be worse than what they’d do to both of us if we just sit here and wait.”
Her eyes narrowed as she studied Ryan’s face. “Where are you going to go for help?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. There were those houses out there before we came through the big gate. Maybe they can help.”
“Maybe they’re part of whatever this is.”
“I could break into an empty one, then. All I need is a phone.”
She was right. He could see that much in her expression; but it had to be a hard decision to let your son out of your sight. He got that. He also got that there was no other alternative.
Then it dawned on him how disgusting it would be to have a dead guy staring at her while he was gone.
While she continued to think it over, Ryan stooped, grabbed two fistfuls of Brother Stephen’s shirt at the shoulder, and started to pull. As soon as the dead man’s shoulders cleared the floor, his head lolled at a horrifying angle back and to the side—as if he were staring over his left shoulder at his own butt—removing any doubt that a broken neck had caused his death. Ryan’s stomach flipped at the sight, and he redirected his eyes to the side.
In the deep reaches of his brain, he felt a pang of awareness that he had actually killed someone. He also realized that he didn’t care. No remorse, no disgust. None of the emotions that he knew were appropriate.
Christyne rose from her bed and scurried four steps to catch up. She stooped and grabbed the assailant’s pant legs to help. “Where are we taking him?”
“Grab his ankles, Mom,” Ryan said, again shifting his gaze. “You’re pulling his pants down more.”
Christyne adjusted her grip and lifted the body’s legs by his ankles. Together they moved the body to the corner opposite the chamber pot. They covered him with a table, and then stacked some boxes around him.
“It doesn’t look like it did before,” Ryan observed when they were done.
Christyne planted her fists on her hips and gave him
that look.
“Honey, if they come down here, I think the broken window and missing prisoner will clue them into something being wrong.”
“Oh.” Ryan felt his ears flush. “I guess so. How long will it take for him to start to stink?” he asked.
“Long enough,” Christyne said, but he could tell from her expression that she had no idea. “Don’t worry about that. It’s time for something to start breaking our way.”
A moment passed. They all knew what the next step was, but it was a difficult one to take.
Ryan made the first move, heading back toward Christyne’s bed and the ventilation window above it.
“How will you find your way?” asked his mom.
He didn’t look back at her as he answered, “Like you said, something’s got to start breaking our way.” He stood on the bed for a better look at the window. He twisted the latch and pulled the glass panel in. Since it was hinged at the bottom and tilted inward, that panel was the first obstacle to be overcome.
“Blow out the lamp,” he said.
As soon as darkness returned, Ryan leaned farther out from the bed, grabbed the panel with both hands, and then dropped all of his weight. It broke with a frighteningly loud crack.
“Oh, my God,” Christyne hissed. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “That was the window.” He’d snapped it quickly because he knew that if he voiced his intention first, she would have wanted to talk about the alternative options. Screw that. He didn’t know what time it was, but he knew that the darkness was his only friend out there, and the more of it he preserved, the better his chances for success.
With the window panel out of the way, the night was visible—a charcoal-gray rectangle against a black foreground. If he looked real hard, Ryan could see shadows.
“Are you sure you can fit through that?” Christyne asked.
Ryan was wondering the same thing. It was a ridiculously tiny hole. “Sure I’m sure,” he said.
Christyne grasped his shoulder. “Promise me you won’t come back,” she said.
He gaped.
She chose her words carefully. “When you make your call for help, promise me that you’ll keep going. Promise you won’t come back to help.”
Ryan felt something snag in his gut. He hadn’t thought it through that far, but this wasn’t what he was expecting. “I can’t just leave you behind,” he said.
That’s not what Dad would do.
“You won’t be,” Christyne countered. “You’ll be sending help. Makes no sense for you to walk back into danger.”
“How will I know if you’re okay?” he asked.
She looked straight at him. “My Ryan doesn’t fail.”
Tears pressed behind his eyes. He had never heard her say anything like that. He failed all the time.
He needed to say something, but he didn’t know which words would be appropriate. And he didn’t trust his voice to produce them. In the end, he chose to say nothing.
He turned his back to his mom and faced the window. With a short hop, he was able to reach the window ledge. From there, a simple pull-up brought his face to the opening, where the frigid air assaulted him.
Somewhere out there lay freedom or death. He didn’t see a way for it to end anywhere in between.
C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN
 
Ryan had no idea that his head was as big as it was. Once his forearms were lodged in the opening of the window, he ducked his chin to fit through, but his nose and the crown of his head formed a wedge that blocked him from moving even an inch.
By rolling his head to the right and pressing down hard with his left cheek against the ledge, he thought there was hope that he might be able to muscle his way through. He might have to leave his ears behind, but he could make it.
Just as he started to worry about how he was going to fit the rest of his body through the opening, somebody—it had to be his mom—grabbed his legs at the knees and lifted them.
“I’ll push as you pull,” she said.
And that worked. With his head clear, his shoulders slid easily. He elbow-crawled his chest and belly clear, and once he felt his belt line against the ledge, he knew that he was home free. He pulled his legs and feet up, drew them under him, and he was free.
The feeling was overwhelming. It took his breath away. He didn’t realize how crippling the isolation of imprisonment was until he left it behind. He rolled to his stomach and turned back to the window. Before he could even ask, his mom stuffed his clothes through the opening. He pulled them through.
“Stay warm,” she said. “And be careful.”
The blackness on his mom’s side of the window was absolute. As he wrestled back into his clothes, Ryan could see nothing, yet he knew that she was watching him, depending on him. Again, words failed, so he turned away without saying anything.
There was no going back now. He was surprised that the thought brought little angst. What was, was. It was the same mental place he went to during a track meet.
He couldn’t count the number of meets he’d won when he’d had no business winning. He wasn’t the biggest, and Lord knew he wasn’t the strongest, but he was as fast as most, and if you didn’t let yourself think about defeat, it was amazing how often you could win.
He needed to get going.
Walking farther away from the house, he tried to make the night shadows jibe with his memories of the drive in on that first night, but the two were not equating for him.
We arrived in the front,
he thought.
I must be in the back now.
Moving even farther away, he navigated a wide circle to his left around the building. He was looking for a long tree-lined driveway leading to an elevated front porch. Once he saw that—or at least what looked like that in the darkness—then he could begin to retrace their route.
As his eyes adjusted to the night, he realized that the lack of a moon was at least partially compensated for by a sky full of stars. The edges of the shadows were surprisingly sharp, he thought, if mottled by the trees, and he realized that he would be visible to others who might have been gazing out at the night.
When he turned the second corner, he saw the porch and the long driveway. Their minivan was gone, though. In fact, there were no vehicles at all. Yellow light flickered in the windows. He had no way of knowing if there were more people inside, or if the place was empty, and he couldn’t afford the risk of checking.
His mission was to get help. If he went back to the cabin and got caught, God only knew what would happen to them, but the one thing that was guaranteed was that this opportunity for rescue would evaporate.
And then there’d never be another chance.
He had to keep going. He’d promised he’d keep going.
Dropping to a low-profile crouch, he turned his back on the cabin and moved to the cover of the trees.
His plan—if you could even call it that—was to avoid the roadbed itself because he thought he’d be too visible. Problem was, by staying off the road, he had to walk, climb and crawl through all kinds of weeds and sticks and shit, and in the process he made the noise of an advancing army. After about twenty yards of that, he made the decision to stick to the edge of the roadbed and move slowly. If a vehicle or a person came his way, he’d just have to hope for enough time to drop out of sight.
He had no idea how long he’d been walking down the driveway, but it felt like a long time. Was this the correct way to the fence? He knew they’d spent hours on the road, but he really had no idea how long they’d driven from the front gate to the cabin.
The cold was becoming a problem again, causing him to shove his hands deeply into his coat pockets. His nose ached from it, and when the wind blew, it hurt his eyes. He tried to remember what the local weatherman had said about this cold snap, but Ryan never paid any attention to the news, unless there was a possibility of schools closing.
Is anybody missing me at school?
he wondered. Outside of his track team, he didn’t know many people. Come to think of it, he didn’t know that many on the track team, either. Since most of them had grown up together, there really wasn’t a lot of room for newcomers in their cliques.
He and his mom had left their real friends down in North Carolina at Fort Bragg—those were the ones who would notice they were missing, except they’d been missing since summer, when his mom had decided to come north. Other than Aunt Maggie, no one in their circle would care enough to report them missing, and Aunt Maggie was visiting a friend in France.
All the more reason for him to be heading off for help on his own.
As he trudged on, it was hard to tell if the road he was walking on was paved or if it was merely frozen dirt, but as he hunched against the cold and watched the shadows of his feet take step after step, he wished he’d thought to wear warmer socks. The cold came up through the soles of his Nikes as if he were barefoot.
He heard a voice.
His body acted instinctively, without him having to tell it a thing. He dropped to a low crouch and duckwalked quickly to the edge of the roadbed, where he fell to hands and knees along the edge of the tree line.
He heard another voice. Both were male, and neither sounded all that close. Certainly, they didn’t sound angry or threatening; just two guys having a conversation about something. Ryan couldn’t make out the words, but when one of them laughed, he felt tension drain from his shoulders. They clearly hadn’t seen him.
He wondered where they were. The night was so quiet, the air so cold and pure, and the breeze so constant, that they could have been thirty feet away or thirty yards away. Maybe even farther.
But if their sound carried so easily, so would any sound that he made. It was time to be very careful.
From where he lay in the ditch that ran along the raised roadbed, he couldn’t tell if the owners of the voices were moving or stationary. He remembered that the guards who manned the front gate carried guns, and he wanted nothing to do with any of that.
But he couldn’t just stay here. Sooner or later, he was going to lose the darkness. When that happened, it was all over.
He needed to move closer. He crawled on his belly at first—the way he saw soldiers do it in the movies—but that full-body dragging created way too much noise. He decided to risk rising to his hands and knees and advancing that way.
Once again, the cold became a real problem. Why hadn’t he thought of bringing gloves?
Yeah,
he chastised silently,
next time you get kidnapped, be sure to dress warmly.
By being able to place one hand and one knee at a time, Ryan was able to move far more quietly. He still made noise, but not that much more than the wind. Besides, the wind was blowing in his face, away from the people he was approaching, so that should help him be quieter, too.
At least that’s what he told himself.
He figured it took five minutes to crawl close enough to be able to see who was talking. Barely silhouettes in the darkness, they were tall enough to be adults, though to Ryan’s ears, their voices sounded young. They both wore bulky coats, and from the roundness of their heads, he assumed they were wearing stocking caps to stay warm. He envied them those. He also envied them the rifles he could see slung over their shoulders.
And then there was the good news: Beyond their silhouettes, Ryan could clearly see the outline of a fence. He’d finally made it to the edge of the property.
Now that he’d finally gotten so close, he realized how flimsy his plan was—or, more accurately, that he didn’t have a plan. Somehow, he was going to get over the fence unseen, and then somehow, he was going to find a place where he could make a phone call. That was a lot of somehow.
And all of it depended on these guys moving on. Or falling asleep. Or getting struck by lightning. For the time being, Ryan settled on becoming invisible and allowing his breathing to slow down. As the sound of blood thrumming through his ears died away, he could actually hear the words they were saying.
“. . . starting a war. Like any war, people are going to be killed.”
“But kids. I just don’t see how that is anything but wrong.”
“It’s about the anger. It’s about focusing it on all those godless rag heads, and so far, Brother Michael says it’s going great.”
A long pause followed—long enough for Ryan to wonder if maybe they’d moved along.
Then, “Are
you
willing to go that far?”
“I’m a soldier. If I have to kill, I’ll kill. If I have to die, I’ll die.”
“I don’t mean that. That’s all of us. I mean kids. You’re willing to kill kids?”
A derisive laugh. “Name me one war in the history of wars where kids didn’t get killed.”
“That’s different. It’s one thing when a bomb falls in the wrong place, or a stray bullet goes through the wrong wall. I mean, are you willing to
target
kids?”
“I will follow the orders that are given to me.” Another pause—a shorter one this time. “Are you saying that you
wouldn’t
?”
Ryan heard a distinct change in tone. “N-no, of course not. I’m just saying I’d try to find a different assignment.”
“But if you were given an order—”
“I’d do my duty.” Another long pause. In Ryan’s mind, the guy was getting defensive. “Seriously. I’m just talking here. Don’t look at me like I’m a traitor. I’m a loyal servant to the cause, just like you are.”
“You make me wonder sometimes, Brother Samuel.” The other one said this in a tone that dripped with disapproval. “Questioning leads all too easily to disloyalty. You know this.”
“Of course I know it. And Brother James, I’m sorry that I said anything. I think sometimes that I am not as strong as the others. I worry that when the time comes, I might freeze. I don’t want to be one who fails.”
Who the hell are these freaks?
Ryan wondered. Brother this and Sister that. Killing children? Holy shit.
“We all have doubts,” Brother James said. “But I believe that when the time comes, our training will take over and we will do everything that is expected of us. We need to stay focused on the honor, and if we do that, the rest won’t matter.”
“Do you have your mission yet?” Brother Samuel asked.
Still another pause. “We’ve been here too long,” Brother James said. “You need to walk your route. So do I. Stay warm.”
With that, the night grew silent again.
But what did the silence mean? Ryan hoped it meant that they had wandered off, a conclusion rendered more likely by their need to “walk their routes.” He thought again of the guards he saw at the gate when they first arrived. First there were just a couple, and then more arrived. It made sense, didn’t it, that they would walk the fence line, like sentries in the POW movies?
Only one way to find out.
Ryan rose again to his hands and knees slowly and quietly, and dared to peer into the night. The spot where the guards had been standing was now empty, their cube of space now occupied by the outline of the chain-link fence against the night. The fence was the goal. The first goal, anyway. If he could make it over that, then other options existed for him. If he couldn’t, well, only one option remained, he supposed, and that one sucked.
If he tried the fence, he might get out. If he got caught trying, they’d probably kill him outright. That’s what the guns were for, right? But if he stayed, they were going to kill him anyway. The fence was the only option.
Even as he inventoried his options, he continued his slow, steady crawl toward the fence. Toward freedom. As he closed to within fifteen yards, and then ten, he fought the urge to hurry. At the ten-yard mark, he realized that the trees were all gone. An unpaved roadway of sorts had been denuded of trees on either side of the fence, presumably to allow the guards to walk their routes, just like Brother What’s-his-face had said. He remembered with a shudder how easily he’d been able to make out the details of those guards in the starlight, and now realized that the clarity came from the lack of tree cover. The lack of any cover at all.

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