My ears were ringing. Even more footsteps were now running toward me. The gunfire had
alerted the men to my hideaway.
I pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened this time. My body was violently convulsing and I
could feel the cold tears on my face as I pulled the trigger over and over but nothing happened;
the gun was stuck or it only had one bullet or I had broken it.
A man jumped out from the brush and clasped his arms around me to prevent me from shooting.
He tried to pry the gun from me. I struggled, fought back with everything I had left in me. But
I couldn’t compete against his strength and he finally managed to get the gun from me.
He cupped his hands around my face and forced me to look at him. It was Cameron. His lips were
moving rapidly but I couldn’t hear anything—just the screams in my head and the ringing in my
ears. His warm lips scorched my freezing skin as he kissed my forehead, my nose, my lips.
The brush next to him moved and I jumped back, petrified. Cameron threw his arms around me,
grabbed me in a bear hug, while Meatball slowly slinked toward us and licked my frozen fingers.
Cameron looked deathly panicked. He was holding me by the shoulders and talking to me, possibly
shouting, but I heard and felt nothing.
After several failed attempts at communicating with me, he took out a short-wave radio and
hastily spoke into it. With one last frightened glance at me, he turned his back to me, grabbed
my arms, threw them over his shoulders and around his neck. He hoisted me onto his back and
started running.
Meatball was ahead of us and led the way home. We trekked for what seemed like miles. I hadn’t
realized that I had run so far out into the woods.
Slowly, I started hearing again, starting with Cameron’s rapid breaths. I also started feeling
the cold through my body. By the time we reached the property, my teeth were chattering, and my
naked feet and fingers were burning.
Cameron carried me toward the house. It was chaos everywhere on the property. Some of the high-
rankers were carrying bodies into parked vehicles while others frantically walked around,
surveying the land, looking for an enemy.
“Don’t look,” Cameron softly warned me as we walked past two guards placing a body in the
back of a pickup truck. I concentrated on how good it was to hear Cameron’s voice again.
Cameron carried me into the house and immediately up the stairs, not giving time to think about
glancing toward the kitchen doorway. The bedroom was complete disarray. Drawers, my clothes, my
stuff were strewn on the floor, the mattress had been flipped off the bed, and my ballerina lamp
was shattered on the ground. Cameron released me from his back and made me sit on the mattress
on the floor.
“We need to get you packed quickly,” he explained as he started taking the clothes on the
floor and piling them up by my feet. In a nightmarish haze, I got up and walked over to the
curtains. The duffle bag was still hidden there, untouched. I dragged it out a few inches.
Cameron looked at me curiously for a second.
Then he threw the bag’s strap over his shoulder and simultaneously grabbed a blanket from the
messy bed. He wrapped the thick blanket around me and picked me up in his arms again. We headed
downstairs and out the door. Cameron placed me onto the passenger-side seat of his car, kneeling
in to put the seatbelt around me and closing the door.
He went to Spider, who was wearily standing by the front stoop, engrossed in a conversation with
Tiny. I watched them, and I watched a puffy-eyed Carly walk out of the house with a bag. She
threw her things in the back of Spider’s truck, and climbed in.
Cameron, Spider, and Tiny spoke with haste, then they all dispersed. Spider climbed into his
truck—his tires spitting rocks as he raced away. Meatball climbed in the back while Cameron
grabbed another T-shirt from his own bag on the backseat. I hadn’t noticed until then that his
T-shirt had been drenched in blood. Then Cameron and I sped away from the farm too.
He drove us down the gravel road, faster than he had that day when we took the Maserati out.
When we had turned onto the main road, he had grabbed hold of my hand. Though I was wrapped in a
thick blanket, my teeth hadn’t stopped vibrating. I stared at the road ahead, semi-conscious
that Cameron was worriedly glancing at me every other minute.
We drove for hours with neither of us speaking, with me never breaking my stare with the road.
Cameron didn’t let go of my hand.
Eventually I recognized the Callister city limits, but we continued to drive past the city.
Cameron finally veered onto a dirt road through a cluster of trees. We arrived to a small log
cottage that had a sunken front porch. He stopped the car and sighed.