Chapter 17

Chapter

Seventeen

GRACE

I was lucky I didn’t bite my tongue, as it was, I bashed my elbow and narrowly avoided hitting my head as I slid. I scrambled to hang onto the taser, but my hands and arms weren’t doing what I told them to do.

Bouncing over the roughness of the ground just made it harder as I tumbled. I wanted to try and catch myself. Casting up against a heavier chunk of rock, I stopped sliding. The surface was rough on my palms. The taser was gone and I fumbled in the dark for it.

My jaw still trembled and my teeth clacked together. It seemed to take me more than a minute to think about what I wanted to do, process it, and then get my body to do it. Even then, I couldn’t get my legs under me. It was like I couldn’t process the fight or flight colliding in my system.

A grunt came from the man in the dark. There wasn’t enough light from the headlights above to see where the man was. I made it to my feet and a hand clasped my ankle.

“Goddammit,” I swore, jerking my foot back and toppling at the same time. It was like something right out of a nightmare. The man was just there, gripping my leg again and dragging me. Pulling me toward him, I surmised.

I didn’t want to go to him. I didn’t want to go to anyone. I just wanted to get away. I started kicking with one foot for all I was worth. I couldn’t seem to break his grip on the one leg, but the minute I made contact with his chest, and shoulder, I kicked harder.

His grunts punctuated swear words. “You fucking little cunt…”

The voice gave me another target, and I managed to land my foot against his cheek and jaw. His grip on my leg spasmed and I yanked it free. Crab walking backwards, I didn’t get far.

The slap of his hand on my leg halted my progress. Dragging me toward him, he banged me against more rocks and sharp stones. A light burned into my retinas and left me seeing halos dancing in the air.

It also gave me an up close and personal look at the man holding onto me. Dark eyes, dark hair, a red angry mark on his cheek that looked like something my shoe had left. The rushing of footsteps rustled through the grass.

My assailant jerked his head to look past me. He struck me with an elbow and I went down sideways. My face exploded with pain and my eyes went blind with tears. I tried to cover myself from more blows, when something slammed into the man over me.

I barely got my head up to see him hit the ground. Then a fist landed into his face. Then another. The wet impact of flesh slamming into flesh filled the air around us. The light that had dazzled my eyes came from a high-powered flashlight laying on the ground a few feet away.

For all that it seemed I’d traveled farther in the dark, the Jeep was only two dozen feet away, maybe less. The man who’d been attacking me was down, and there was a distinct crack of bone to go with the wetter blows.

Something hot splashed against my face. Eventually, the rain of blows slowed as the man ceased any attempt to fight back. He wasn’t moving at all. If anything, I didn’t even hear him breathing.

The smell of hot copper stained the air to go with the metallic flavor in my mouth. I tried to look for the taser, but the world was cast in an array of shadows thanks to the blazing bright single light.

I needed to get out of here before whoever that was decided I was a prisoner too. Climbing to my feet was a challenge, particularly with how hard I was shaking. A shift of the light cut across the downed man’s face.

Or what was left of his face. It was mostly a bloody, swollen mess and I jerked my gaze up from it immediately. The man turning to face me was?—

Bones.

I sagged at the recognition which brought a certain amount of relief with it.

“Why are you out here?” His voice was so soft, I almost didn’t hear it.

“Because bullets hit the car and I didn’t want to get shot inside of it.”

“So you decided to get shot outside of it?”

“No, I decided to run. I had my taser.”

Shaking his head once, Bones grabbed my hand and tugged me with him. “Stay close.”

Not like he gave me a choice. He moved at an angle, zig-zagging his way back to the car. Something moved in the dark ahead of us. Bones shifted his weight, releasing my hand before he lashed out at what turned out to be a man. Three strikes and the man went down and didn’t move again.

When he clasped my hand again, I dug my nails in to hang on. Then we were heading up the hill again. Two sharp, short whistles sent a shiver over my skin. He answered with one longer whistle.

“All clear,” Voodoo said as he suddenly rose up out of the darkness. A second flashlight appeared in his hand and he used it to do a scan of the hill. “Did you decide to take a walk, Firecracker?”

“They shot the Jeep.” Despite my effort to keep my voice calm, it still came out broken. “I didn’t want to get shot.”

“Seems fair,” he said before turning the light back to the Jeep. His sigh was eloquent. “Probably a loss.”

“Need to burn it,” Bones said. “Grab our gear, throw their bodies in, and light it up.”

“How do we get out of here?” If we burned the car, we were in the dark, in the middle of nowhere.

“We get creative,” Voodoo said, before he glanced me over again. “Here.” He passed me the flashlight. “I’ll get the other one. Stay with Bones while I drag bodies.”

“We could—” I broke off the offer, because he was already gone. It was eerie how they moved in the dark.

“Come on,” Bones said. Without further elaboration, he set off up the hill and it took some effort to keep up with him. Each step we took higher earned more protests from my body. It wasn’t just a hill anymore but a very steep incline that had me using my free hand to climb as well as Bones tugging me with him

At the top, I wanted to double over. Sweat slicked my face and my shirt stuck to me. There were two more men on the ground, both dead. A fifth one was dead in the front seat of their car. The headlights and grill were crunched from them ramming us.

“Stay here.” Bones let me go and then moved over to one of the bodies. He shoved it with his foot and it went tumbling down the incline. The second body followed the first. When he opened the driver’s side door and pulled the man inside out, I had to look somewhere else.

The headlights being on revealed far too much. Including the fact we were on the side of a road, at night, and so far, no one had driven by. How much longer could our luck hold out?

As if reading my mind, he tossed the last body down the hill.

“Son of a bitch, Bones,” Voodoo called. “Some warning next time.”

The man standing there, with his expression a slash of violence in the darkness stared down the hill as one corner of his mouth kicked a little higher. The smile was more unsettling than the cold expression.

“Move it,” he said finally, seemingly trusting his voice to carry. “We’re exposed up here.”

With that, he turned back to the car and shut off the lights. He had a set of keys in his hand. That was something. I wrapped my arms around myself as I tried to see around the dazzled retinal burn left over from the headlights.

I could see a flashlight moving below. It wasn’t hard to figure out what he was doing. The car doors opened, then closed. It took another ten minutes, but Voodoo appeared at the top of the hill with the pair of bags.

“Come on, Firecracker,” Voodoo said as he opened the backdoor on the car we were acquiring. It was an older model Bronco. The interior didn’t smell pleasant either. “Don’t worry, we’re getting rid of this soon.”

Still, I climbed inside, but I didn’t see Bones anywhere. Voodoo was in the front seat and he pulled out his phone. The whole front screen was cracked. What I could see of it was all spiderwebbed glass.

Not a good sign.

When Voodoo held something over his shoulder, I stared at it. “Your taser,” he said and I accepted it. “Try not to drop it this time.”

Surprise filtered through me. “I didn’t mean to lose it that time. I dropped it when I tased the guy and we went down the hill.”

Voodoo twisted in the driver’s seat and gave me a firm look. “Did you hurt anything?”

“Probably,” I answered. “Everything hurts. But we need to go, right?”

So far, everything had been about running. Staying ahead of the people trying to take me.

“Does this mean taking the tracker out didn’t work?” Cause we left the doctor’s office hours ago, right?

“Not necessarily,” Voodoo said, but he didn’t continue with anything resembling an explanation. Bones had also not gotten in the car. Where was he?

Just when I’d about given up on waiting for Bones, he suddenly opened the passenger side and slid inside. I got a brief look at his hands under the overhead light. One set of knuckles were raw and bloody. There was blood on his shirt too. Voodoo had blood on him as well.

“Let’s go,” Bones said.

Without comment, Voodoo started the Bronco and turned back onto the stretch of road we’d been driving along. We’d barely gone a few hundred feet when something went up behind us in a plume of too bright fire. There was also the sound of shattering glass followed by an intense vibration.

“Did the Jeep just explode?”

“Yes,” Voodoo said over his shoulder. “Gas tank was three quarters full. It’s going to burn for a while.”

Regret tangled in my gut. “I’m sorry about your car.”

Voodoo shrugged. “It’ll be fine, we can replace a car.”

Bones’ phone began to ring. He pulled it out of his pocket. It didn’t look shattered like Voodoo’s but it was definitely filthy. “That didn’t take them long.”

He didn’t answer the phone, however, he just sent a message then lowered the phone again.

“You know,” Voodoo said, almost conversationally. “Just cutting them out is going to make them more stubborn.”

“I’m aware,” Bones said. “By the time we get back, I’ll have a better plan for them and for us.”

For them?

Lunchbox and Alphabet.

“Did I get them into trouble?” My side hurt and so did my hand. Even my cheek ached. I just wanted a bottle of some painkillers, an ice pack, and a very long nap.

“No,” Voodoo said easily.

“They got themselves into trouble,” Bones said, as he switched screens on his phone. “We need a new contingency.”

He didn’t say anything else for quite a while. After another thirty minutes or so, he said, “Uranus, forty-two miles.”

“Lake of the Ozarks?”

“Maybe.”

They were talking in code again. Or maybe they meant exactly what they said. I was almost too tired to care at the moment.

“Let’s find a highway motel, get you two settled, then I’ll go for supplies and a new car.”

Voodoo didn’t say anything, he did frown. Despite shooting a look at Bones, he didn’t say anything at all. He didn’t like the plan?

It took over an hour, but they found a cozy little hotel just outside of town and off the highway. The rooms all had external doors, so we could go straight inside. Bones left us in the car while he cleared the room Voodoo had rented.

How they managed to not look covered in blood impressed me.

As it was, Bones also unscrewed the light that was right outside the door to the room and then unscrewed the light on the door next to it. It created a deep shadowy relief against the building, almost masking the doors.

“We’re clear,” Voodoo said, sliding out of the car. He snagged the bags and then came around to open my door. It took me a moment to stand, as it was, I listed heavily. “Hey,” Voodoo caught my arm when I would have just fallen back into the car. “Woah?—”

The bags hit the ground suddenly as the world went sideways.

Then everything went dark.