Silas (32 page)

And I’d be there to make
sure that it all worked out. I’d get to take him down.

I helped her make a few more sharpened
sticks.

We ate some of our remaining
food.

We loaded everything up into
the backpacks, and we started through the woods as silently and
inconspicuously as we could. Because for all we knew, Rolf was out
looking for us. He was hunting us, and we weren’t any match for him
and his guns.

Christa was definitely right
about one thing. We needed to wait until he was vulnerable to get
to him. Find him asleep in his bed. That was the way to make sure
that he couldn’t get the drop on us.

We walked throughout the day, pausing
only once to eat again.

We didn’t see any sign of
Rolf.

Either he wasn’t stalking
us, or he was staying out of sight.

The sun sank down behind the
tree line. The woods was engulfed in night. We could hear the
sounds of insects singing to each other.

Our pace slowed, because it was harder
to see in the dark.

But it didn’t take long
until we emerged into the clearing where everything had started.
The holding cell was there. Empty and concrete and cold. Not long
ago, it had been filled with men, and there had been shooting as we
scrambled into the woods.

They were all dead.

All that remained was Christa, me, and
Rolf.

Soon, Rolf would be dead
too.

Following the map, we crept
past the holding cell, up the hill on the opposite side.

And we found the cabin.

It was actually a little bit
large to be considered a cabin. It was made from interlocking logs,
but it was two stories high with skylights on the sloping roof and
a huge wraparound deck. There were numerous windows, but they were
all dark. A garage sat behind the cabin. The doors were open, and I
could see two cars inside.

I stopped to point them out
to Christa. “Maybe we should just go. We could take a car and drive
away.” I figured that once she was safe, I’d come back for
Rolf.

But she shook her head. “No.
I won’t feel safe unless I know he’s dead.”

I decided it was pointless
to argue with her. Besides, she probably would feel better if she
could see Rolf’s body.

“
Let’s get inside,” she
said.

“
What if he isn’t here?” I
said. The house looked empty and quiet. Rolf could be inside asleep
or he could be out in the woods looking for us. We couldn’t be
sure.

“
Then we’ll hide someplace
and wait for him,” she said.

We crept up to the door of the
cabin.

It was painted green. It had
a cheery looking half moon window at the top.

I put my hand on the door knob and
turned it.

It was locked.

Of course it was locked.

I turned to Christa. “We’ll
have to try a window or something.”

A high-pitched beeping alarm
rent the air.

We both jumped.

She looked at me with startled
eyes.

“
He must have a security
system.” I grabbed her, pulling her away from the door.

Too late.

It opened.

Rolf tore outside, brandishing a shot
gun. He was wearing a pair of plaid pajama pants and nothing
else.

He
had
been sleeping.

He pointed the gun at us.
“Impressive, Drake. You found me. The hunted becomes the hunter.”
He laughed wild and loud.

I started to pull Christa
behind me.

But Rolf pumped the gun.
“Don’t move.”

I froze, still holding onto
her, my pulse racing. It couldn’t end like this. Not after
everything we’d been through. Not after everything Rolf had
done.

He advanced on us, stopping
when the gun was inches from Christa’s head. He laughed. “Should I
shoot her now, Drake? Splatter you with her blood? Shoot you and
dump you someplace, so that you can wander around without her,
agonized, wishing you could die, but coming back to life over and
over again?”

No. Please, no.
But I didn’t say anything.

Christa gritted her teeth.
“It’s all about him, isn’t it? What you did to
me
was about
him
.”

Rolf chuckled. “She sure is
feisty, isn’t she? After everything. Well, maybe she didn’t get
enough of my cock the first time. Maybe this time you’ll watch her
suck it, Drake. Maybe then she’ll get nice and docile. What do you
think?”

Christa snarled. She lunged at
Rolf.

“
Stop!” I yelled. I reached
out and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun, turning it away from
her.

The gun went off. The metal vibrated in
my hands, hot.

The bullet punched into my upper arm,
busting a gaping hole in my bicep. I gasped at the pain, letting go
of the gun. Stumbling backwards.

There was a echoing painful
gasp from Rolf.

He dropped the gun.

And then I saw that one of
Christa’s pointed sticks was stuck in his throat.

His eyes bulged and his hands fluttered
around the wound.

It was spurting
blood—pulsing it out.

The red liquid bathed his
hands.

He gurgled.

He looked at his
hands.

He looked at Christa. At me.

And he fell.

Christa brandished another of the
sticks, standing over him.

He twitched, blood still spurting from
his neck.

And then he was still.

I stepped forward, clutching
my arm. “You must have hit an artery.”

She looked at me, her
expression fierce. “What does that mean?”

I knelt down next to him and
picked up his wrist. He didn’t have a pulse.

His eyes stared wide and frightened up
at the night sky.

“
He’s dead,” I said. “You
killed him.”

She slowly lowered her
sharpened stick. “Dead?”

I nodded.

“
B-but… it was so
quick.”

I stood up. “Tends to work
like that.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“
Are we okay?” I said into
the phone. “Well, we’re alive, Sloane. But we haven’t been eating
right, and we’ve been in the woods. Rolf chased us. He shot at us.
We’re, you know, kind of shaken up and exhausted.”

Christa and I were in the
kitchen of the cabin. I was using Rolf’s satellite phone. We were
too far out in the boonies for regular cell coverage or for
landline phones.

“
Tell me where you are,”
said Sloane. “Tell me where you are, and I’ll come get
you.”

“
No, that’s okay,” I said.
“There are, um, cars here. They’ve got GPS, and I looked into it.
It’ll probably take us three hours or so to get back to Morgantown.
But if you wanted to meet us halfway or something, I can tell you
what route we’ll be taking.”

“
Are you sure you should be
driving, Silas?” said my sister. “You just said you hadn’t been
eating right.”

“
Well, we’re in the process
of raiding Rolf’s refrigerator,” I said. “We’re eating now. We’ll
probably take showers and steal some of his clothes.” The cabin had
electricity by virtue of several generators. A hot shower sounded
amazingly civilized. “But we don’t want to hang out here any longer
than we have to. So, we’ll get on the road soon.”

“
And he’s dead?”

“
He’s dead, Sloane. He’s
very fucking dead.”

“
Oh my god, Silas. You have
no idea how worried I was.”

“
I’m fine,” I said. Christa,
on the other hand, well… I was pretty sure she was the opposite of
fine.

“
You don’t sound fine,” she
said. “You sound… different.”

“
It’s, you know, a lot of
crazy shit,” I said. “I’ll fill you in when we get
back.”

“
We will meet you,” she
said. “I’ll call Griffin and Leigh, and we’ll get in the car, and
we’ll meet you as soon as we can.”

“
How’d the wedding
go?”

“
Are you kidding? There was
no wedding,” she said. “Griffin’s been going nuts trying to find
Christa. No one was in a celebrating mood.”

“
Shit,” I said. “I’m sorry I
screwed that up for them.”

“
You didn’t screw it up,”
she said. “Rolf did.”

* * *

We drove through the darkness, our
bellies full, our bodies scrubbed and cleansed.

It seemed as if I should
have been relieved, but I wasn’t. It was true that I didn’t feel
the clawing, gnawing panic that I’d felt for the past several days,
when we’d been running in the woods, afraid someone would shoot us
at any second. But I didn’t feel like things were better either. I
felt sort of numb and hollow. Empty.

It was very late at night,
around three in the morning. I should have been tired, but I felt
edgy and awake instead. It was important that we get away from that
place. I couldn’t have slept there.

Christa sat in the passenger
seat, looking out the window into the night. “Why’d he do
it?”

“
Rolf?”

“
Uh huh.”

“
He wanted revenge against
me. I’d slept with his wife. He wanted to show me what that felt
like.”

“
But he killed her. Sylvia,
I mean. He killed her, right?”

“
Yeah.” Talking about Sylvia
usually made me feel a kind of tight anger in my gut. Right then,
it didn’t make me feel anything at all. I wasn’t sure if I was
capable of feeling anything. Maybe I was too exhausted for
emotions.

“
So, he didn’t care about
her. Not really. If he could kill her, why did he care that you
slept with her?”

“
It wasn’t like that,” I
said. “He didn’t love her or anything. He thought of her like a
possession. One of his many toys. He didn’t want to share her. He
was angry with me because I ruined her for him.”

“
That’s fucked
up.”

“
He was rich and entitled
and insane. He did whatever he wanted. He was sick.”

“
I guess.” She let out a
slow breath. “And that’s why he hunted people?”

“
I figure he did that
because he could. He wanted a challenge. He didn’t think anyone
would care if he killed men that were already going to
die.”

She was quiet for a
minute.

So was I.

It was starting to rain. At
first it had only been tiny raindrops falling out of the sky, but
now they were getting bigger. There were more of them, plopping and
spreading on the windshield. I turned on the wipers, thinking that
it hadn’t rained the entire time we were out in the woods. That was
kind of lucky, I guessed.

No, fuck that. Nothing about being
chased around with a mad man with a gun was lucky.

“
So, none of it meant
anything,” she said. “He hurt me to get at you. And he wanted to
get at you because he was angry at you. But deep down, he was just
crazy. There’s no real reason that he did what he did. It was all
pointless.”

“
Pretty much.”

“
That sucks.”

“
You’d think it would be
easier if there was a reason?”

“
Maybe,” she said. “Or if it
had been harder to kill him. It was so easy. All the shit he put us
through, and he was dead in seconds. He didn’t suffer nearly
enough.”

“
No,” I said. “He
didn’t.”

She sniffled.

I shot a look at her. She
was crying. My hand snaked across the car to rest on her knee.
“Hey,” I whispered.

She shook me off. “I’m fine.
You don’t need to do that.”

“
I wish you would stop
saying that,” I said. “You’re not fine.”

“
Shut up,” she said. “Yes, I
am. I only wish I’d been able to hurt him as much as he hurt me.
Maybe if it had taken longer for him to die, maybe then I’d
feel…”

I gripped the steering
wheel. “I don’t think so.”

“
You don’t even know what I
was going to say.”

“
His suffering wouldn’t have
changed your suffering. It would be the same no matter what. You’d
have killed him, and he’d be dead, and you’d still feel exactly
like this.” I sighed. “Revenge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
Hadn’t Griffin said that to me before all this got started? I
wasn’t sure if I’d understood until right at this
moment.

“
Are you pissed you didn’t
get to kill him?”

“
No.” It was funny. I
thought that I would be. I thought that it would have made some
kind of difference. But now that he was gone, I realized that it
wouldn’t have mattered how he died.