Page 116 of Triple Threat

“I got you,” he uttered in my ear. “Just keep us going, babe. You did good.”

“No, we have to go back!” I cried. “The boats are gone; we need to go back for Roan!”

I knew, I think, that what I was saying didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t make myself think of why.

“We can’t, Shady.”

“No! We have to,” I said and Kyle’s arm went around my waist, holding himself to my back, his other hand grabbing for theRum Runner’swheel.

“Keep us on course, Sadie. There’s no going back and there ain’t no coming back!”

“Kyle, you don’t know what you’re saying!” I argued and then Kyle fucking Lachlan did something that he had never, ever, done before… not even when we were teens.

He screamed at me.

“Just do what Ifuckingsay! He’sgone! He’sdead! And there ain’t no going back!”

It happened then… a light lit the dusky sky, a great flash behind us and Kyle screamed, “Fuck!” His hand gripped over mine painfully hard, the wind whipping into our faces, stinging, cold, thrusting icy dread into every nook and cranny, filling every last bit of me with frozen angry hurt, my heart seizing in my breast, turning into a lump of ice and numbing me slowly from the inside out as the bomb at Bootlegger Head went off and turned the last shred of hope I had to complete ash.

* * *

“Look,I’m hit and we need to go to ground before I crash,” Kyle said and handed me another bulky black military-like backpack up from theRum Runner.I took it automatically and set it next to the two already on the dock.

He reached up, and I automatically gave him my hands, leveraging myself against the sturdy wooden timbers beneath my feet to pull his considerable weight up onto the dock beside me. He wasn’t fat, but hewaspure muscle and easily outweighed my much smaller frame by a fairly considerable amount; just how much I couldn’t guess and right now, I didn’t care to.

He shouldered one backpack, held out another for me to shrug into, and then picked up the third by its top loop handle.

I tried not to think about the significance of that third backpack.

“Kyle, where are we going?” I asked.

“Just follow me, the bug-out plan has more than one safe house for us to lay low.”

I did, following him through the warehouses and to the chain-link fence surrounding the shipyard, or marina, or whatever you called it. I could tell he was in bad shape; he didn’t move quickly and in the scattered vapor lamps I could see that his clothing was torn and some of it was bloody.

“Cover your ears,” he ordered, and I did. He pressed his thumb onto a switch he held in his fist, a distant explosion thumped. I guessed it was theRum Runner, and I was surprised to find that I didn’t have it in me to care. I was too numb.

“Turn,” he ordered, and I did and he pulled a pocket cutting torch from my bag. He turned a knob, there was a click, and then a puff of orange flame. He adjusted it until it was a blue knife and then used it to cut through the wires of the fence along one of the support poles. He leaned against it and created a gap with his body weight for me to get through. “Watch the edges, they’ll be hot.”

This was at least familiar. I was an old hand at slipping through fences. Kyle handed me the third pack, devoid of Roan’s big shoulders to fill the straps. He stepped through and pushed the wire back together. It wasn’t going to fix anything but it wouldn’t be so obvious that was where we breached the fence.

“Okay, come on.” He took my hand after he made it through the fence himself and we stopped at a nearby bus stop of all things. He checked the schedule, cursed, and said, “Too long to wait. Come on, we’re walking. It’s not all that far.”

“Are you sure you can make it?” I asked, worried.

“I’ve been through worse,” he said, glancing around without looking at me.

“I call bullshit,” I said with a shudder. “There’s absolutely nothing worse than what we just went through.” He didn’t respond, just raised the back of my hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to it, there was a pain in his eyes that I couldn’t fathom. Were there worse things he had been through?

“Keep your eyes open and your head on a swivel, Shady.”

“Just tell me where we’re going,” I pleaded. “I bet I could get us there faster and easier than you.”

He stopped then and looked at me.

“I know these streets better than you, better than even…” I couldn’t say his name. “With all his fancy maps and computer programs.”

“Okay,” he said wearily. “We’re going back to the gray house.”

---