The Reckless Oath We Made

“We have to get him in the truck and get him to the hospital,” I said. Without even talking about why, the hospital in Ashdown was one of the things Gentry had marked on the map. “Dirk, you go with Gentry. You’ll go west into Oklahoma, then head back to Missouri. I’ll take Edrard to the hospital.”

“Nay. He is my brother. I shall take him,” Gentry said.

“No. Whoever takes him is going to have to answer a lot of questions.”

“Yeah, she’s right,” Dirk said. “Gunshot wound, they’ll have to call the cops.”

“The cops are going to be coming soon enough. Maybe LaReigne already called them,” I said.

“Where is LaReigne?” Dirk said.

“She’s not coming. She’s staying here with that asshole.”

“Holy shit. I wondered, you know.”

“Oh, shut up. You didn’t wonder shit,” I said. “Now, come on, we need to get Edrard in the truck.”

We tried. Even though Edrard screamed, even though the edge of the bath towel shifted and I could see his insides, we tried to move him. Gentry was strong enough, he could have done a fireman’s carry, but not without killing Edrard. After we gave up, Gentry went back to pressing the soggy bath towel over the place where the blood seemed to be coming out fastest. Dirk and I watched. The sun had set and the only light was from the cab of the truck.

“Call 911.” I took the phone out of my pocket and handed it to Dirk.

If we hadn’t done so much planning and talking, it might have been a problem when the emergency dispatcher answered, but Dirk didn’t have any trouble giving directions. The highway, the county road, how many miles, the fire road.

“There’s two gunshot wounds. Two people hurt. One of them real bad,” he said, and then, “I ain’t nobody. Just send an ambulance.”

He disconnected before the dispatcher could ask him anything else. When he handed the phone back to me, I saw he had a big gash on his arm. A bullet graze?

“Now what do we do?” Dirk said.

I looked down at Gentry, who had his head bowed like he was praying. He was bloody up to his elbows.

“We have to go. We’re all going to get arrested otherwise.” I hated myself for how crass I sounded, but if we stayed, we were going to prison. I would be abandoning Mom and Marcus as much as LaReigne was.

I put my hand on Gentry’s shoulder.

“We have to go, Gentry. Do you hear me? We have to leave. I know that’s really shitty, leaving Edrard, but you need to come with us.”

He didn’t look at me, so I tightened my grip on his shoulder, trying to will him to come back from wherever he was.

“We have to go,” I said. “Come on.”

He raised his head, and I thought he was finally hearing me, but he looked up. Toward the Witch.

“I know what I swore. Yea, I ken it well, but I will not leave him. He is my brother.”

“Please, Gentry. Remember about Melusine? How she told Raymondin to ride out of the woods and tell no one what he had done? This is like that.”

“I would it were, my lady. For tho my oath be but ash and salt, I cannot go with thee for I cannot leave my brother,” Gentry said.

I should have been crying and begging him to go, but I was thinking of what I needed to do to protect myself. I found the other burner phone where Dirk had dropped it while we tried to move Edrard. I looked around to be sure there was nothing else that could place me there. The gloves I was wearing were bloody, but I hadn’t left any fingerprints behind.

“I have to go, Gentry.” I put my hand on his shoulder, hoping he knew I was there. “I have to go, because of Marcus and my mom.”

“Heap on me curses, if thou wilt. Always have I done what thou bid me. Ever I trusted thee and here I am!” He shook my hand off his shoulder. “Here lieth my brother. With him lieth my trust in thee, hag!”

Right up until he said hag, I kinda thought the next words out of his mouth might be odious serpent. He was talking to the Witch, but I deserved it. He had trusted me. I was the one who’d brought him there. It was my fault Edrard was lying there, maybe bleeding to death.

I had the keys to Gentry’s truck, so Dirk and I got in, and I backed it down the fire road, wishing I could go faster, but knowing it was more important to get out of there without running into anything. After I backed through the gate, I put the truck in park and slid out of the cab.

“What are you doing? We gotta go,” Dirk said.

“One thing.”

I pushed the seat up and popped the lid off Gentry’s roadside kit. Like I figured, the medieval Boy Scout had a pair of road flares. I tossed one to Dirk, and we cracked them and laid them at the edge of the county road to mark the turnoff for the fire road. When the ambulance came, it might make the difference in whether they got to Edrard in time. Back in the truck, I buckled my seat belt, turned on the headlights, and pulled out on the road like a law-abiding citizen.

The ambulance, and the cops with it, would come from Ashdown, to the south, so I drove west toward Oklahoma.

CHAPTER 44

Zee



   We took the long way back to Missouri, on a bunch of little two-lane roads through Oklahoma, leaving a trail of trash behind us on the way north. In the dark, we took the scenic route past Broken Bow Lake, where Dirk tossed the guns out into the water, piece by piece. After that, it was a bloody T-shirt in one trash can, bloody gloves somewhere else. A broken burner phone here. The other there.

Throwing things out should have felt like I was lightening the load, but nothing could do that. I was pretty sure I would be carrying the feeling of leaving Gentry and Edrard behind for the rest of fucking forever.

We didn’t stop until the big truck stop north of Smithville. I cleaned up there, and bought new clothes to replace Dirk’s bloody ones. Cheap sweatpants and a truck-stop GOD BLESS AMERICA JESUS T-shirt.

“What happened?” I said, while he changed in the parking lot. I didn’t want to know, but I had to. It was my doing.

“I was down by the road, keeping watch like Gentry said, and that guy came at me.”

“Did you shoot first or did he?”

“It happened so damn fast, I don’t know,” Dirk said. “He was shooting at me, I was shooting at him, and then he didn’t shoot back. That’s how I knew I’d killed him. I never killed nobody before.”

“Did you shoot the other guy? At the trucks?”

“Yeah, but it was too late. He’d already shot Edrard before I got there.”