Run - Blake Crouch [76]
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.
Ed had swollen up against the steering column, his head resting on the wheel. Dee grabbed hold of his left arm. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and it bent easily as she heaved Ed out of the car. Finally got him free and he tumbled out of the driver seat onto the dirt road, his legs still caught up in the floorboard.
“Give me a hand here, Na, but don’t look at his face.”
They dragged him the rest of the way out of the car and off