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 fuck 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.
Cole and Naomi became still, and soon they were both murmuring softly in their sleep. Dee turned over onto her stomach, the stiffness in her joints excruciating after nearly twenty hours in this hole.
She crawled up the embankment and peered out past the trees.
A bonfire raged in the middle of the clearing and some of the men had gathered around it, their faces aglow, while others carried the pieces of the cabin they were using for firewood over to what she now realized was a pyre.
Mathias had been hoisted up in the middle of the blaze. Even from sixty yards away, she could see that the crossbeams which held him were still standing and that in fact her imagination had failed to concoct anything as remotely evil as what they had actually done to the man.
The soldiers’ laughter sounded alcohol-infused.
Somewhere out there, a woman wept.
Dee eased back down into the depression and roused her children.
They crept all the way back to the razorwire, which no longer hummed, and followed it through the trees. The fire was roaring now, shooting flames thirty feet high. From Dee’s vantage, she could see one of the soldiers running naked through the grass carrying a burning branch, which he delivered onto the front porch of a cabin.
The soldiers hooted their approval, assembling to watch as the flames licked out along the sides and the roof like molten fingers. Then the voices started up from inside.
“Keep running, guys,” Dee said, “and don’t listen.”
She could hear the people beating on the inside of the door and pleading to be let out, the soldiers talking back, taunting them. What welled up inside of Dee nearly drove her out into that clearing. Maybe she’d only kill one or two of them before they stopped her, but God, in this moment, nothing would feel so right.
“Mom, look.”
Naomi had stopped just ahead at a break in the fence where the soldiers had come through the night before, the razorwire severed and pushed back.
“Be careful, Na,” Dee said, and she lifted Cole in her arms and followed her daughter between the coils of wire.
When they were through, she set Cole down and they all jogged away from the screaming in the clearing.
Naomi was breathless and crying. She stopped, said, “We have to help them.”
“Baby, if there was even a slim chance, we would, but there isn’t. We’d end up dead, just like them.”
“Are they hurting?” Cole asked.
“Yes.”
“I can’t stand hearing it,” Naomi said.
“Come on. We have to keep moving.”
In a little while, they came out of the woods onto the road about a hundred yards up from the checkpoint. Dee took the Glock out of her parka and they moved toward the vehicles up ahead.
No light. No movement.
The sound of voices in agony coming through the trees with the distant glow of flames.
A pair of hummers still sat in the road and the dead soldiers, too.
They arrived at Ed’s Jeep.
“Tires are still inflated,” she said.
Out of the gas cans fastened to the luggage rack, only one had survived the gunfight to hold its contents.
“We taking the Jeep?” Naomi asked.
“If the engine isn’t damaged. Why?”
“Ed’s still in the driver seat, and he doesn’t smell good.”
Dee went around the back of the Jeep and stood beside Naomi.
“No, Cole, stay there.”
“Why?”
“You don’t need to see this.”
“What is it?”
“Ed’s dead, Cole. It’s nothing good to see. Just stay right there, please.”
She held her arm over her nose and mouth, could only imagine what the potency might have been in warm temperatures.