Chapter Twenty:
Terrorized
There were firecrackers resounding in the night. Rocco was on his feet before I had even opened my eyes. He ran to the front door just as the off-duty day guards who had been unwinding in the basement bolted past him and ordered him to deadbolt the door behind them. Rocco did as he was told and limped back to the living room, his face white with terror. He had a cell phone to his ear.
“Cam …” he half-yelled out of breath, “We have a big problem. The house is being attacked.” I heard a voice calmly responding on the phone, but couldn’t make out what was being said.
Rocco answered the voice, “I don’t know who or how many! It’s dark out!”
A fresh round of gunfire exploded in the distance and seemed to be moving closer fast. The voice on the other line was now rapidly speaking.
“I’m not running, Cameron. I’m not a coward. I’ll stay and fight with the guards,” Rocco told him.
Cameron was screaming, cursing on the line. Rocco peeled the phone away from his ear and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, “Cameron wants to talk to you.”
I picked up the phone, “Camer—”
Cameron didn’t give me a chance to greet him. “Emmy … Go with Rocco. Get out of the house. Run for the woods.” He was panicked. I could hear commotion behind him. Spider was barking orders, and people were yelling and shuffling rapidly.
Rocco had tottered to the cabinet and pulled a handgun out of the drawer. He handed it to me. Steady thuds could be heard at the front door.
“Oh, God! Cameron, they’re at the door. I think they’re trying to knock it down!” I breathed into the phone.
Cameron swore successively and pleaded, “Emmy, get out—” and the line went dead. I looked at the phone and handed it over to Rocco.
He examined it. “Battery’s almost dead. I forgot to charge it,” he confessed and put the useless phone back in his pocket. Rocco then started to rush me toward the patio door, but I resisted.
“You need to get out of here, Em.”
“I’m not going without you,” I whimpered. “We run together. Cameron said—”
He was incredulous. “Run? Em, I can barely walk! I would just slow you down. Besides, I’m not going to let them take my brother’s house without a fight.”
“This is no time for you to prove your toughness to your brother—”
There was a loud snap at the front door—the doorframe was giving into the attack. The trespassers were moments away from entry.
“Can’t you just listen to me for once? I’m not going with you, and I’ll be dead if something does happen to you because Cameron will kill me himself.” Rocco seemed to be getting calmer while I was getting closer to losing my mind.
“Rocco, I am not leaving without you! Please …”
Crack! The doorframe had finally given in. I jumped. Rocco swore. He looked around the room and, with all his might, pushed me into the furthest corner of the living room where there was a large wicker chest. He opened it, threw the blankets that were inside it on the couch and forced me inside. As he closed the lid, I heard the front door violently swing open and a trudge of footsteps rushing toward the living room. Through the weaves of the chest, I could see Rocco standing guard in the middle of the living room with his arms bravely crossed.
A heavyset man led the gang into the living room. With his finger on the trigger of his machine gun, he glanced around the room and stopped to stare Rocco down. Rocco never flinched.
“Clear!” the heavyset man yelled.
He and the rest of his men slightly relaxed their grip on their weapons and parted to the sides. A lanky, bookish man strolled in from the back through the split of men, stopping in front of Rocco. Unlike the sweaty and agitated men that backed him, the man was tranquil, unconcerned. There was something familiar about him. My heart was pumping so fast I was shaking.
“Where’s the girl?” he demanded of Rocco. He had an almost female tone to his voice.
Rocco cocked his head to the side. “It’s Norestrom, isn’t it? I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Where’s the girl, mongrel?” Norestrom repeated more forcefully.
“What girl? There aren’t any girls here.”
Norestrom peered at Rocco through his red-rimmed glasses. “Listen, kid, we know the girl is here. All of your men are dead. Now, you can tell us where she is and you’ll live, or you can die and we’ll still find her. Which one is it?”
Gunfire suddenly erupted at the back of the crowd, and I saw two of Norestrom’s men go down with a splat. One of the ailing guards had crawled out of bed from the basement and snuck behind them, taking two men down before getting shot himself.
While Norestrom’s men had been distracted with the guard, Rocco had cocked his fist back and punched Norestrom right on the nose. Norestrom fell back like a rag doll. He slid to the floor and his head hit the ground with a thud.
One of Norestrom’s men ran to his side but Norestrom shoved him away. Disoriented, Norestrom wobbled to a sitting position, his nose bleeding, and his glasses shattered on his face. He was incensed.
“Kill him,” he ordered pinching his nose with two slender fingers.
The heavy man immediately raised his weapon.
Shots were fired.
Rocco fell limp to the floor.
In that moment, I felt like I’d been knocked out of my body. What I had seen … it couldn’t have happened. My vision blurred, but my eyes stayed on Rocco. I willed him to get back up, to fight back, to run. But he wasn’t moving. Red stains soaked the front of his gray T-shirt, and a puddle of burgundy was spreading around him.
Thick fog had started creeping into my brain.
Norestrom got up and brushed his hands over his khaki pants. “Find her and bring her to me, dead or alive,” he commanded and thought about it, “Preferably alive.”
The men scurried and spread out, leaving Norestrom behind in the living room. Norestrom approached Rocco and kicked his lifeless body. Rocco didn’t react. Satisfied that Rocco wouldn’t attack him again, Norestrom bent over him and searched his pockets. He pulled out pieces of my Rocco’s world: screws and a nail, a napkin, a few peanuts, candy wrappers, and the cell phone.
Norestrom flipped the cell phone open and quickly scanned the screen before the battery went completely dead. Then he bellowed, and his heavy assistant ran back to him.
“He had time to call them. We don’t have much time,” Norestrom said. “Get the body out of here and make sure it’s the first thing they see when they drive in.” The heavyset man jumped and called for aid. They carried Rocco out of the living room, leaving a trail behind.
Norestrom stood and scanned the pool of blood with a smug smile. When the heavy man came back and stood with him, Norestrom turned angry. “Go find the girl!”
The two of them ran off through the kitchen doorway, and I heard their footsteps climbing the stairs up to Cameron’s room.
The sound of things getting thrown around and broken rang through the house as the men searched high and low for me.
But the living room was left empty.
I didn’t have much time before they started pulling apart the living room to find me.
In a daze, I opened the lid of the chest, crawled all the way to the patio door, sliding it open. I crept out into the night and crawled into the dark recess that had once been the site of my hidden first kiss with Cameron. I could hear men stomping within the living room and kitchen now. I rolled myself under the deck’s railing, stuffing the pistol in the waistband of my shorts and clinging to the side as I heaved my body over. Hanging from my fingers, I dropped to the ground and immediately skidded away from the basement light, squeezing my body against the cold, brick wall.
The basement patio door slid open, and a man stepped outside, glancing around. My heart pumped frantically as his gaze was slowly coming into my path.
Gunfire erupted again, and flashes of light were coming through the windows of the basement bedrooms. One of the ailing guards, who had been too ill to get up, had surely been found and killed. The man rushed back into the house to view the action.
Shadows were moving violently within the pool house. Carly’s world was now being ripped apart. Soon the men would start searching the grounds for me. With the moon and stars lighting up the landscape, I knew I would be exposed if I moved out of the shadow of the house. Taking one big breath, I darted across the grounds, praying that no one was watching.
I managed to get near the trees without notice.
Hopefulness started inching its way inside me, until I tripped.
My foot had gotten caught. I pushed myself up through the long grass and staring back at me were dead eyes—eyes that I had once known, eyes of one of the guards who had been shot down by Norestrom’s men. A scream involuntarily left my lips, and I kicked, struggling to get my foot loose.
In the distance, I heard a booming voice cry out.
“She’s over here!” a man coming out of the pool house yelled. All of a sudden, every man looked out of the back windows of the house and started herding in my direction like a pack of hyenas.
After I managed to struggle free from the dead guard’s grasp, I ducked into the dark woods.
Branches slashed me in the face, and I pummeled full speed into a few tree trunks. I couldn’t see more than two feet in front of me but I could hear the men’s war cries and earth-stomping footsteps near and around me, so I didn’t stop. I kept running, often tripping over fallen logs and bushes. My legs were getting severely scratched and bruised. My hands were tattered. The adrenaline was pumping too fast for me to feel much, but after a while, my burning lungs were also starting to plot against me. Though my mind continued to speed through, my body was slowly giving up.
When my shoulder hit an unseen tree limb, I fell backward to the ground, the back of my head hitting the hard ground. I forced myself to get up but just fell forward on my hands.
I couldn’t go on anymore.
The forest was black, with the only light coming from an imperceptible moon that reflected off the treetops. I couldn’t see the men that scoured the forest looking for me, but I could hear them all around. Voices screamed all over, and inside my head. I slid my body next to a tree trunk and shakily took the gun into my hands.
I had never actually held one before. It was cold and heavier than I had imagined it would be. My hands didn’t fit well around the handle. I pointed the gun in front of me with both shaking hands, resting my elbows on my knees, and curled up into a ball against the tree. I closed my eyes and hoped that the voices would go away. In a half-answer to my prayers, the wind picked up through the trees, and rustling leaves drowned out some of the voices. But the screaming in my head continued mercilessly.
I rocked my body back and forth in an effort to keep my mind focused on staying warm. I was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, and my bare feet were covered in cold mud.
It got much colder. At first, I could feel the chill flow right through me, and my body shook uncontrollably. Eventually, though my body continued to shake, I felt nothing. On a few occasions, I heard branches crackling and breaking nearby as the men continued to search for me in the darkness. I would just squeeze my eyes tighter, praying that they would go away. And they did, every time.
After what seemed like days of being curled up against the tree, dawn seeped through the woods. I became horrifically aware that I was no longer hidden from them by the darkness but I could see nothing but thick brush around me—maybe this would be enough to keep me unseen?
But then there were rapid steps and crashing branches. I listened with all my senses and realized that the noises were heading in my direction.
I had been uncovered ….
Somehow, I always knew that I was going to die alone. Maybe I even knew that I was going to die young—or maybe I had once upon a time just wished I would die young to get it all over with—but I had never thought that, in the face of death, I would have something, someone to fight for.
As the stomping steps moved closer, faster, I stopped my hands from shaking long enough to cock the gun’s lever back, like I had seen done in so many movies before.
I could now clearly hear running steps just beyond the brush that had kept me hidden until now. Though my hands were shaking uncontrollably once again, I held onto the gun as tightly as I could and hoped that I would figure out how to fire this thing before I was discovered. As the leaves to the side of me rustled, I turned, closed my eyes, steadied myself tight against the tree trunk and pulled the trigger. With a deafening bang, the gun fired. Pieces of tree bark went flying everywhere.
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.
We got out, and Meatball excitedly led us to the door.
Inside, the cottage was simply furnished. There was a small kitchen table with two chairs in the middle of the room, a tiny kitchenette on one side, and a black woodstove on the other. A narrow wooden staircase led to a small square loft at the top. Through the railing that surrounded the loft-square there was a single bed. All of the barren walls were made of exposed wood. It smelled of Cameron. It all made me feel a little warmer.
Cameron took me by the hand and led me into a minuscule bathroom that was off the kitchenette. He pulled the blanket away from my shoulders, stood me in front of the mirror and started the shower. I didn’t recognize the person who was staring back at me through the mirror. This girl had a horrifying, petrified look to her. There were scratches all over her face, and her hair and skin were muddied and red. Her eyes were wild and shocked. This couldn’t be me, I told myself.
Cameron’s reflection appeared behind mine. He didn’t look like himself either. I noticed that his face was as muddied and scraped as mine and watched through the mirror while he pulled the leaves and dry brush from my hair. His gaze caught mine, but this time, he didn’t look away.
The steam from the shower started to fog up the mirror. Cameron went to grab a towel and told me to get undressed.
“I promise I won’t look,” he said with a weary smile, trying to recall a more carefree time when we had stripped out of our soaking clothes at the farm.
I undressed and entered the shower as Cameron left the room. For a while, I just stood there while the water burned my frozen skin. The water hit my head, and I watched the remaining debris from my hair wash down the drain. Slowly, the feeling came back, inside and out. I could feel the throbbing in my bruised and bloodied legs. I could also feel the fear and the pain that were lingering deep, slowly rising to the surface.
I wrapped myself in the towel that Cameron had left for me and walked out to the kitchenette where Cameron was waiting by the small table.
“Here,” he said as he gently handed me a stack of his clothes. “These will keep you warm.”
Like a robot, I dressed myself while Cameron took his leave for the shower. The clothes he had given me smelled like him. By the time I was dressed, Cameron was already out of the shower, dressed in jeans and shirtless. I noticed him and his tattooed bullet wounds. I could feel my drowned emotions bubbling up.
Always keeping an eye on me, he went to the stove where the kettle was now boiling and poured hot water into two cups. He walked back, placed the cups on the table, and sat in the chair next to mine.
I picked up the mug, cupped my hands around it, and looked up at him. He kept my eyes. When I tried to reassuringly smile back, my vision blurred with the tears that had been dammed up for too long. I had trouble breathing, and I could feel something erupting inside of me.
The cup started to shake in my hands. Cameron pulled it away like he had been expecting what was happening to me.
I started quivering. “Rocco was right there …,” I whispered. “I didn’t know what to do … I lost him …” And I started to fall.
He lunged out of his chair and took me into his arms while long, hard sobs escaped me. Cameron hushed me and held me tightly while images of Rocco’s grinning face and his dead body lying on the floor flashed through my head in a swirl. My heart felt like it was being squeezed into a rock-hard fist.
Leaning into Cameron, I cried until the tea grew cold and the room dark. I cried until my shoulders, my arms, and my lungs ached and until the tears had long dried. When I was done, and all I could do was whimper, Cameron carried me to bed. My head on his chest, he stroked my hair until I fell into a dreamless sleep.
It was the middle of the night. My throat was throbbing, and Cameron wasn’t next to me. The pain that was in my heart was unbearable. The cottage was quiet, and I could hear the crickets lamenting their lullaby outside. I heard a chair creak down in the kitchen, and I tiptoed to the edge of the loft. Through the rails I saw Cameron sitting at the table with his head in his hands and his fingers raking in and out of his hair. His shoulders were heaving in quick sequences. It took me a moment to realize that he was sobbing, silently, alone.
I knew I was witnessing something never seen. I thought about going down there. But then I let Cameron grieve the loss of his little brother in peace.
After a while, the chair pushed away from the table, and the wooden stairs groaned. Cameron crawled back into the single bed and lay next to me. Feigning sleep, I exhaled, took his arm, and brought it under my arm to my other shoulder, fitting myself into him. Cameron didn’t push me away. He clasped his fingers through mine and pulled me even closer to him. He stuffed his face in my hair and sighed, and we fell asleep as we became one skin.