It had led him here, to the dark and the cold, with a gash in his stomach that was bleeding profusely and playing with his consciousness. Beside him, Finch had found peace, and for a moment Beau envied him so much that his eyes started to close, and he quickly shook his head, braced a hand on the ground and raised himself up. He cried out and stopped, but did not abandon the progress he’d made. With one hand clamped over his belly, he drew his legs beneath him, relying on their strength to help him up, and they did. He stood, shoulder pressed to the tree, gasping, his knees trembling, the front of his jeans soaked with blood. Beau was weak from blood loss, but he was not yet dead, and that was something. He took a moment to steady himself and looked down at Finch, who was little more than a long shadow with a pale smudge for a face. Beau made a silent promise that he would do everything he could to make sure Finch wasn’t left here to rot or be picked apart by animals, even if it meant burying him himself. “No man left behind” was the motto for fallen soldiers on the battlefield, but Beau wasn’t sure he’d ever really understood it. What lay at his feet was no longer anyone he knew. Whatever happened next would hardly bother Finch. He was gone. Only the body remained. Desecration, he thought. We leave no one behind to be desecrated by the enemy. Still, he wondered why it made such a difference to anyone. It was the soul and the spirit people mourned, not the body, so why should it matter what became of it?
He realized such musings were simply a way to stall, to avoid moving when he knew it was going to be agony to do so. It was also a means of trying to disseminate the guilt he already felt at the thought of leaving Finch here alone. But if he didn’t, he too would die.
He pushed himself away from the tree and stumbled through the woods toward the cabin. He had been mistaken about the agony, he realized. There was no agony in his belly. It was utter torture.
The moonlight faded, and for one panicked moment, Beau thought it was unconsciousness coming to claim him and he stopped, leaned against a tree until the light silvered the woods once more. Breath pluming in the air before him, he focused on the murky yellow light from the cabin window up ahead and hurried on, the blood sticky between his fingers.
Keep goin’, he told himself. Not far. Get there and you can sit and figure out what happens next. But keep movin’.
The light in the cabin window was a beacon, drawing his wounded form toward it. In his waistband, the gun, cold against his skin. In his pocket, the reassuring weight of his cell phone. He prayed there was a signal. There was only one call worth making now and he would do it even if his injury conspired to leave him dead on the forest floor. One call, and perhaps everything they’d done wouldn’t have been in vain after all.
Keep m…
He was within hailing distance of the cabin when the world abruptly swept up and away and nausea gripped him.
The darkness came again.
This time it was not the moon.
Despite his injury, McKindrey’s approach had up until this moment been confident, as if he knew without a doubt how this was going to play out. But now, with Claire backed up against the wall, he stopped and licked his lips. In the light through the windows, she could see perspiration beading his sallow skin. He did not look nervous, but wary, the gun pointed at her chest. His eyebrows were knitted, as if he’d suddenly forgotten the finer points of hostage taking.
“Just take ’er easy now,” he mumbled, as if advising himself.
With no room to move, her hand bent behind her, Claire felt the wire she’d taken from the bedsprings poking her between the shoulder blades. She told herself to relax, that panic would get her nowhere, but then realized that was a lie. Stark panic had freed her the first time she’d found herself a captive in this charnel house. But would it do so again? And even if it did, did she really want to give herself over to such impulses a second time when she was still haunted by the guilt of the first?
“Don’t do this,” she said. “If you let me go, I won’t say anything.”
“Why not?” McKindrey asked.
There was no response to that. She shook her head dumbly.
“I would think it’d be the first thing you’d do, mad as you are at me.”
“I’m not mad at you,” Claire lied. “I’m mad that my friends are gone and I can’t bring them back.”
“But I had a hand in that.”
“Not the worst one.”
He smiled unevenly, appraised her anew, but the gun was steady in his hand. “You’re a clever girl. I’m real sorry you’re stuck in this, though I expect you won’t believe that.”
She closed her eye. “If you are sorry, then you might as well do me a favor and end it.” The wisdom of the request eluded her, but whatever had motivated it, it suddenly felt absolutely right. With it came a calm similar to the one she had felt when McKindrey had mentioned the field with the dead tree. An end was coming, and though she did not know the form it would ultimately take, she welcomed the peace it promised.
“End it how?”
“Pull the trigger,” she told him. “You’ve helped put a whole lot of people in their graves. Might as well help one more.”
In the darkness, she relied only on her senses and the small voice that drifted up from somewhere deep inside her that whispered, There’s no way out except his way. You fight and even if you escape him all you’ll ever do is fight. Why not end it right here, right now? What do you even have that’s worth fighting for?
She heard the raspy sound of his breathing.
The jingle of the keys on his belt.
The creak of leather.
But the sound she expected, feared, hoped for…didn’t come.
She looked.
He was still standing there, still staring at her, the cruiser lights flickering behind him, the headlights painting one side of his face, the other mired in shadow. Frustrated, she asked, “What are you waiting for? You have me. I’m giving you what you want.”
He nodded once. “So I see. Why?”