Seduced by Three (8 page)

Her eyes focused on human…

“Jesus,” she whispered.

Human heads were balanced on the tops of spikes, like gruesome lollipops. The spikes were driven into the tree lawns directly adjacent to the passageways. She let out a shocked puff of air, as if someone had just sucker punched her in the gut, as she took in the entire scene. The barricade was a grisly still life comprised of artistically displayed warning graffiti, severed heads, and large, manmade contraptions with sharp edges, wires, and dangling things that would make noise if touched. Along with the dogs, it was an obstacle course built to prevent easy advancement and passage through the car barricade. Apparently, she and Sarge were not the only people who were going to try to ride this out at home. Somebody had gone through quite a bit of trouble to make anybody think twice before deciding to travel down their street.

Grace felt a hand close on her arm and swung around, raising her weapon before realizing it was Sarge.

“Let’s go,” he mumbled as he led her in the direction of the lake.

“No. We need to go back. You’re bleeding.” She tried to examine his arms, but he pulled away.

“Now, Grace! I’m sure the dogs alerted someone. We need to get out of here before they show up. Whoever those dogs belonged to will be coming from our street.” He tugged her arm. “Let’s go!”

Anarchy. It was starting. People were on the move now, probably leaving to find food, cleaner water, or medical aid. All along the street, the storefront windows were broken. Useless items and broken glass littered the pavement.

She couldn’t believe that they were still moving toward the lake. Sarge had to have known the streets would be this way. Was he walking her through all of this to make a point? To show her firsthand how dangerous it was getting? Because if he was, it was working.

Taking in all the destruction, Grace became desperately worried about Van. She just wanted to see him again, make sure he was all right.

Over the past two days, a plague of disturbing worries about Van’s well-being interrupted her thoughts. Every time she heard a gunshot or yelling outside the house, it shook her, and just like a bottle of shaken soda, she felt ready to explode. Van was the reason they were going to the lake, the reason Sarge got bitten by those dogs, and the reason why they were risking their lives. She wondered how furious Sarge would be if he knew. She shook her head. She knew better than this. Her thoughts and decisions were so backasswards that it felt like she didn’t even know herself anymore.

The fact that she couldn’t extend a hand to help Van made her throat tighten up and her insides roil with grief and rage. If it were her shelter, she would have taken him in. A brief idea flitted through her mind. Maybe she should take Van back to her shelter. But just looking around made her common sense reject that idea. They’d be lucky to make the three-hour journey alive.

The area was quiet and looked deserted. Grace followed about twenty feet behind Sarge, and both of them had their guns drawn. A sudden halt from Sarge sent Grace’s adrenaline surging again, and her senses searched the shadows for danger.

Her eyes landed on what had made Sarge stop. It was Van. Her body reacted to the sight of him instantly. She was awash in a tidal wave of relief, and she rushed forward toward the man.

“It’s just me,” she heard him say to Sarge, holding one palm up when he stepped out of the shadows.

Sarge lowered his gun quickly, and the men shook hands and exchanged a few mumbled words. Van’s eyes moved through the darkness searching for her, and then a smile with an undercurrent of simmering desire transformed his face when he’d located her. Sarge resumed his trek down the street while Van flashed his twinkling eyes over to Grace. He waited for her to catch up, a dark shadow in the moonlight, and then fell into step beside her.

“Hi, Grace,” he whispered, reaching out and running a hand down her arm. “How you holding up?”

She felt like she wasn’t getting enough air, and the more she tried to regulate her breathing to normal, the more breathless she sounded. “No complaints. You?”

“I’m good.” He glanced down at her for just an instant and then swept his gaze back and forth across their path. His large body moved with finesse as he scrutinized every crevice for threats. He gripped his rifle as if it were a natural extension of his body. Grace wondered if she would even get the chance to sight a shot before he blew any threat into oblivion.

When they got to the piers, Sarge motioned for Grace to advance with him. Van stayed on the shore while they walked to the end of the pier together. Without a word, she stripped and slid into the water. A second later, Sarge leaned over and handed her a bar of soap. Grace washed quickly while the men stood guard then lifted herself onto the pier, dried, and dressed herself before lifting her gun and giving Sarge a nudge indicating that she would cover him.

In less than a minute, Grace heard Sarge slide into the lake. She forced herself to keep watch, despite curiosity baiting her into catching a glimpse of him naked.

She looked down to the mouth of the pier at Van. Her blood rushed, and her insides danced at the memory of their kiss. Grace experienced a keen sense of confusion. These men were splitting her in two, and the divided halves of her mind and body were struggling, one against the other, clambering to be acknowledged.

Sarge was out of the water quickly, and moments later, he stepped next to her fully dressed.

They walked side by side toward the shore, and then Sarge stopped to fill the water containers.

Grace faced Van, her eyes examining the haggard face that looked back. “Jeez, Van, you look like shit.”

“You look a little worse for wear, too. What happened?” He nudged his chin toward the grisly looking wound on her arm.

She beamed at him. “Good eyes. Ran into a bullet. I can be so clumsy sometimes.”

Van’s eyes turned lethal. “Let’s see if we can get you home without you being such a klutz this time,” he said, looking over her shoulder. She heard Sarge approaching from behind her. The three of them started toward home in the same configuration they had formed before. As they neared their street, Sarge stopped his forward progress and motioned toward Grace and Van to join him.

“You’re going to have to let us travel the rest of the way on our own,” Sarge said to Van, looking like he meant business.

Van nodded. “Good luck. I’ll see you next time.” The men shook hands then Van touched Grace’s arm. “Bye, Grace,” he whispered.

Their eyes met and locked. Grace felt her face flush. She wanted to lean into him and kiss him, and it looked as if that was exactly what he was going to do.

The sound of the gunshots and Van falling to his knees in front of Grace seemed to occur at the same time. The next shots came from Sarge’s gun. The sound of them exploded in her ears while Van pulled her down and covered her with his body, pinning her to the ground and squeezing the air out of her lungs.

Time ran in slow motion while she was trapped on the ground. She watched Sarge shoot in the direction of the gunfire that was pinning them down. And then she watched the impact of a bullet ripple through his body. She didn’t know where, but Sarge was hit. Moments later, he fell to the ground.

Sarge’s face landed inches from her own. His eyes were open, looking at her. “I’m okay.” His expression was fierce and dangerous as he rolled over onto his stomach and began firing his gun again. “Go! I’ll cover you,” he screamed over his shoulder at her, just as more shots sounded.

Yeah, right.

He had to know by now that she wouldn’t leave him wounded and under fire. Grace watched him bow his head for several moments, and then his eyes fluttered. Slowly his weapon fell from his limp hand. In the next second, he was face-first on the cement.

Grace screamed his name and scrambled to get out from under Van’s body. She knelt, firearm raised toward the building the shots had come from, but she didn’t draw any fire. She waited for movement or anything else that would tell her where the shooter was. Nothing. Sarge had either gotten the person or they’d run for cover.

Grace quickly assessed the situation. Sarge lay facedown with a rapidly growing blood pool forming beneath him. She rolled him over, and her eyes found the bullet wound in his thigh. She ripped off her shirt and tied it tightly around the seeping wound and then picked up her gun, put it in her waistband, and did the same with Sarge’s.

She turned her attention to Van. He was shot in the shoulder, and his arm hung uselessly at his side. She watched him struggle briefly to get to his feet. Then, he wrapped his good hand around Sarge’s bicep.

“Take the other side,” he ordered as he started dragging Sarge away. “Which way?”

“Right. Go right at the barricade on the next street.”

They worked together to drag Sarge through the narrow opening between the upended vehicles.

“Turn up here.” She pointed up the driveway of a house a few doors down from Sarge’s. They scurried through yards until they reached the fence that surrounded Sarge’s backyard. She unlatched the gate and helped Van drag Sarge through, then up the back stairs and into the kitchen.

Once inside, the house with the door locked safely behind them, Grace and Van collapsed to the floor, sucking in air from the exertion.

“I’m going to pass out,” Van said as he tried to stay sitting. The last surge of activity had weakened him, and he lost the battle to stay conscious quickly, slumping over, next to Sarge, on the kitchen floor.

Grace didn’t let either man’s unconsciousness affect her. She had to get the men to the safety of the shelter and then start tending their wounds. Both men were probably around two hundred pounds. How the hell was she going to get them down there?

She stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, then rubbed her hand over her forehead and through her hair
.

Think
.

Grace closed her eyes, gathered herself. Her pulse pounded in her temples, and she could hear the rush of blood in her veins.

She looked around for something to stop the bleeding at Van’s shoulder. When she didn’t see anything readily available, she pulled off Van’s boots and stripped him of his pants, giving him the once-over to make sure he wasn’t injured anywhere else. She wrapped the length of his pant leg tightly over the bleeding wound at his shoulder, under, up again at the armpit, and snugged it as tightly as she could before she tied a knot with the excess material to hold the dressing in place.

Then Grace ran to Sarge’s bedroom and stripped the neatly tucked comforter from his bed. She laid the comforter flat on the kitchen floor next to Sarge and rolled him onto it. From there, she pulled the comforter as hard as she could, moving him through the house to the small opening at the top of the shelter stairs. She put his feet as far as she could inside the cubbyhole then cradled his head on her stomach with the top half of his body between her thighs.

Grace inched forward through the cubbyhole. He was deadweight, and she panicked a little when she realized that she was literally moving his body a mere inch or two during each strained and struggling attempt to maneuver him through the hole to the flight of steps on the other side. It seemed to take an eternity to get his entire body through and positioned feetfirst down the stairs.

She struggled for a controlled descent, inching forward slowly, and lowering them both down the stairs on her rear end one step at a time. It took everything she had to guide him down without letting gravity take over and landing them both in a heap at the foot of the stairs.

By the time Sarge’s body was eased to the bottom, Grace was damp with sweat. She rested for several minutes in the blackness, listening to her own panting, until she was ready to feel her way over to the solar lantern on the table and turn it on.

Quickly, she checked the blood flow of Sarge’s wound. It seemed to have slowed.

Grace moved Sarge’s body a little more by grabbing the bottom of his pant legs and dragging him farther into the room, and then she attempted to calm herself with a deep breath. Her strength was sapped. She wasn’t sure if she would be able to repeat what she’d just done, but she was sure as hell going to try.

Grace ran up the stairs, taking two at a time, and grabbed the blanket she left outside the cubbyhole. She repeated the same technique that she used to get Sarge down the stairs with Van. When she had finally completed the task, the two men were laid out next to each other.

Grace made another mad dash up the stairs, grabbed a bath towel from a closet, and ran to the kitchen to sop up the puddles of blood standing just inside the door. She was on her hands and knees in the kitchen when muffled voices outside the house alerted her. With a last swipe of the towel, she grabbed Van’s boots and crept quickly and quietly to the closet that held the shelter portal. She closed the closet door and then replaced the false wall, sealing all of them in the tomb that smelled of blood, sweat, and her own desperation.

Winded, Grace sat at the top of the stairs for a few moments. She had her gun in one hand and Sarge’s in the other, trying to hear if the people who were outside had entered the house. Whoever it was, it seemed like they weren’t going to risk breaking in, at least not yet.

Grace released a sigh of relief and then walked down the stairs. She stood, turning to focus her attention on the two slabs of motionless, bleeding flesh lying at there. She dragged Sarge over to the twin bed and heaved him, first top half, and then bottom half, onto the mattress. Bringing the lantern closer, she untied the blood-soaked T-shirt she’d knotted tight around his leg to stop the blood flow, and then stripped his pants off. The wound was trickling blood. She rolled him over to see if there was an exit wound.

There wasn’t.

Standing and steadying herself, she walked over and grabbed her bugout bag that had sat packed for years waiting to be used in case of emergency. Inside, she had a small medical kit. It didn’t have much of anything that could be of major value for an injury like this, but it did have tape, gauze pads, and alcohol wipes. Grace also retrieved her pocketknife.

She brought everything back over to the bed then grabbed the lantern and hurried over to the rows of shelves on the other side of the shelter. Much like her dad’s shelter, Sarge had everything organized. Holding the lantern up and close to the shelves, she scanned over all the storage bins, stacked on top of one another and labeled with black marker, looking for something marked “first aid” or “medical.” Finally, she found the bin on a shelf by itself. She pulled it onto the floor and popped the lid.

Grace knew what she was looking for and found the items almost immediately. With the curved suture needle and thread combo and rubber gloves in hand, she raced back to Sarge’s side. She adjusted the lantern for maximum illumination before she ripped open the package of gloves, put them on, and felt around the seeping, bloody opening in his thigh. The bullet was not near the entrance wound. Probing her fingers around the leg, she couldn’t find any hard lumps indicating a bullet underneath the skin. Grace stuck her index finger into the oozing hole, probing deeper and deeper, circling it around until, finally, she felt the hard, crumpled bullet under her fingertip. She tried to make a scooping motion with her finger in an effort to trap it and pull it out, but it was too deep and too tight in there.

Grace swabbed the switchblade and sank the sharp point into Sarge’s thigh, opening up the entrance wound. She pulled the muscles of his leg apart with a thumb and forefinger and stuck her index finger inside the bullet hole again. After some digging around, she was able to scoop the bullet out. She tossed it onto the cement floor and grabbed the supplies she needed to sew up the gaping hole she’d cut in Sarge’s thigh. He bled heavily now, which only increased her anxiety while she tried to focus on her task the best she could in the dim light and deathly silence of the cavernous room.

Despite her shaky hands, Grace worked well under pressure, sewing up his slippery skin. But her mind screamed while she worked. A mixture of self-blame and shame churned like a toxic soup in her stomach as she condemned herself over and over again. If it had been just him here, he wouldn’t have left the shelter for such a frivolous thing as going to the lake. He had tried to concede a little to her will. Now, shit, what had she done? This was her fault.

Grace methodically continued to complete the sutures one by one. She tried to concentrate more on the work she was doing than the unfettered, guilt-fueled blame that stormed her mind. It took forever to complete the nineteen stitches that closed the wound. She cleaned it, then covered it with a gauze pad and wrapped more gauze around his thigh to hold the pad in place.

Grace didn’t stop for a moment to admire her work. She hurried over to Van with the lantern and started taking off all of his gear. He was wearing a flak jacket to protect his torso, which it did, but the wound he was bleeding from was on his shoulder just outside the edge of the vest. She tore his shirt off and rolled him over. She let out a quick breath of relief that there was an exit wound, but he was still bleeding profusely. She ran for more supplies and got to work.

Down on her knees next to Van, she sutured the larger, more ragged, exit wound closed, and then the entrance wound. Her fingers were slippery on the needle, and she was getting tired and frustrated with her clumsiness.

When she’d finally finished working on Van, Grace dropped her hands to her sides and sat back on her heels. The sweat on her skin chilled her in the cool shelter, and now that she wasn’t totally absorbed by the patch-up job, she was suddenly cold and shivering.

She looked down at herself. She was topless, and her hands and body were covered with blood. She snorted and shook her head. She needed to wash again.

In the light of the lantern, Grace looked down at Van and then gently took off his helmet. He was probably about her age, maybe twenty-five. The features of his face were movie star beautiful, kind of like Brad Pitt on steroids. Gently, she stroked the side of his face. His jaw was covered with a week’s worth of bristly growth. And she’d bet money that when he opened his eyes, they’d be blue.

As her gaze traveled over him from his face, to the waistband of his boxer briefs, and then over his long, muscular legs, she had the urge to touch him, to run her hands over the fluid lines of his chest and the ripples of his abs. He was gorgeous.

Grace noted that Van and Sarge’s bodies were strikingly similar, though Van was larger overall. They were both muscled men with defined cuts and curves charting the strong flesh underneath. They were powerful, more than physically capable to defend and protect.

Van also had the same short, cropped military-style haircut as Sarge, but his hair was lighter, light brown to Sarge’s dark brown.

Grace moved Van’s body a couple of feet, away from the bottom of the stairs. She glanced over her shoulder at Sarge’s sprawled body on the tiny twin bed. Both she and Van would need something to sleep on.

Grace crept up the stairs and sat at the top, listening intently. After several minutes of absolute stillness, she pushed open the false wall and prowled quietly out of the closet. It was still dark outside. She pulled a blanket out of the hall closet first and tossed it down into the cubbyhole. Then, she treaded softly to the living room, grabbed the cushions off of the couch, and pushed them through the small opening one by one, watching them tumble down the stairs into the gray gloom. Then she followed them down.

Grace arranged the cushions into a makeshift pallet against a wall, close to the bed, and dragged Van over to them. She rolled, jerked, and pushed him until he looked comfortable on the pallet she’d made.

By then, she was done. Spent. The adrenaline surge she’d experienced earlier, the one that kept her together long enough to care for the two men, had worn off.

She walked over to the bed and leaned over Sarge, smoothed her hand over his forehead, and studied him for a moment before she closed the gap between them and kissed him softly on the lips. Grace lowered herself to her knees and laid her head on his chest. She listened to the steady thump of his heart and felt the rise and fall of his breathing.

“Sorry,” she whispered into the stark silence of the room as tears flowed freely and pooled on his skin. “So sorry.” She remained there, listening to him, feeling him, and her consciousness began to drift. The rhythmic thumps along with the steady motion made him tantamount to a human lullaby.

She didn’t know how long she’d been sleeping that way, but when she next opened her eyes, her knees ached. Bracing herself on the edge of the bed, she pushed herself up to standing and groaned at the stiffness of her muscles.

She turned off the lantern, walked over to the skylights, and pulled the blackout material off of them so when the early morning rays came, they would filter in. Maybe the light of day would change the dismal scene she was sure she’d wake up to.

Grace rolled Van onto his side and slid in next to him. It was a twisted slice of fate that brought him into the shelter. And even though it was at a high cost, she couldn’t help herself from heaving a sigh of relief at the knowledge that he wasn’t out there alone for another night.