Silas Read online

  Well, this was it, then. He had a gun on me. He’d killed Emmett. He could shoot me again, and I’d be all right, but what would stop him from shooting Christa while I was dark? We weren’t going to make it out of this.

  And the hell of it was that that damned fish Emmett had been cooking still smelled so good. I was really freaking hungry.

  The hunter leered at me. “Rolf said a lot of things, you know. He said that we had to save you two for last, and he said that we had to save you two for him. He said he wanted to take you both down personally. And he’s got plans for this one.” He nudged Christa with the toe of his boot. “All kinds of plans.”

  I swallowed. “Why don’t you just let her go? I’m the one Rolf wants.”

  “See, I don’t know if you’re getting it. I don’t care what Rolf wants. He and the rest of the boys are sleeping off a hangover right now. I’m the only one actually out here doing any hunting. And I think that makes me more dedicated. I think that means that I deserve the spoils. So, fuck what Rolf wants. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to shoot you, and then I’m going to have some fun here with the little lady, and then when you wake up, I’ll shoot you again. And again. And again. And—”

  A low growl escaped the back of my throat, and I ran for him.

  He was startled. The words died in his throat. He pulled the trigger on his gun.

  His shot went wide.

  He had a McFarland Pump Action. I knew the weapon. It was a standard issue from Dewhurst-McFarland.

  It meant he had to reload.

  He was fast though. He had a line of shells on the gun, and he grabbed one, reaching around the gun and popping it into place without even looking.

  I ran as quickly as I could. “Christa, run!” I screamed.

  She scrambled backwards, away from him.

  He pumped the gun.

  He aimed at me.

  I hit the ground, diving at his feet.

  His shot sailed just over my head. If I hadn’t moved, it would have punched a big hole in my stomach.

  I collided with his legs.

  He went down.

  I rolled on top of him, reaching for his gun.

  He was gripping it tight, scrambling to get another shell in the chamber.

  I punched him in the face.

  He grunted.

  I grabbed the gun.

  He and I grappled over it for several minutes, both tugging, both struggling.

  I had to get that gun. It was our salvation. We couldn’t mount an offense without a gun. It was the thing that would turn the tide, change everything about our situation.

  I used all my strength.

  And I wrested it from him.

  Immediately, I grasped it by the barrel and drove the butt of the gun into his face.

  It hit his nose. There was a crunching noise.

  I staggered to my feet. I brought the gun down again.

  Blood splattered.

  He stopped moving.

  I drove it down into his face again.

  His skull collapsed.

  All right. Good. He was dead. I was pretty sure he was dead.

  * * *

  “Come on,” I said to Christa. I was bent over the hunter. I’d stripped his body of anything useful he’d had. An unfortunately empty canteen. A camouflage jacket—only a little bloodstained. Extra shells. And the gun. Of course, the gun.

  She was gaping wide eyed at the dead hunter. “But he said he was alone.”

  “Maybe they heard the shots and they’re coming after us,” I said.

  She turned to look at Emmett. “Oh god… Emmett.”

  “We don’t have time, Christa,” I said. “We have to move.”

  She was shaking. “I’m hungry, Silas. I’m really hungry.” Her voice broke.

  “Me too,” I said. “But we need—”

  She darted around me, running over to the rock where Emmett had left the fish to cool. She yanked several leaves off of a nearby tree and used them to wrap up the fish. Then, her hands full, she scampered back to me. “Take it to go. Just like McDonald’s.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad sign that she was able to joke at a time like this. And we didn’t have time to contemplate it.

  I hoisted the gun up. “Okay, let’s move.”

  * * *

  We tore our way through the woods, past the broken-down power lines, fast as we could.

  We kept up at that pace until the sun was high in the sky. We hadn’t heard or seen anything. It didn’t seem as if anyone was following us.

  We slowed long enough to eat the fish. A while later, we found another bush of berries like the ones I’d eaten my first night. I declared them safe, and Christa laughed at me, telling me of course they were safe. She called them dewberries.

  We ate some berries and kept moving at a slower pace.

  We didn’t talk much, except to say various directional things, like whether we’d stop or slow down or which way we’d go.

  Maybe it was because we were too tired.

  Or too scared.

  Or maybe there was simply nothing to say.

  We didn’t hear any gun shots or see any signs of the hunters for the rest of the day, but I figured they’d be pretty pissed when they found the body of one of their own.

  By the time the sun was going down, we were exhausted, and we decided to stop for the night.

  I was worried about being too out in the open, so we hid ourselves beneath the underbrush and lay down to sleep.

  We were pretty close, and I felt a little apprehensive about it. I wondered if she was going to try to attack me in the middle of the night again. I tried to think about how to bring it up, to talk to her about it. I couldn’t find the words. Instead, I turned on my side, with my back to her, hoping that would be enough to give her the hint.

  She spoke. “Silas?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Every time I close my eyes, I keep seeing them shoot Emmett.”

  “I didn’t think you were awake when that happened.”

  “I was,” she said. “I was listening to the two of you. I didn’t let on that I was, because I wanted to hear what you said.”

  She’d been listening in, huh? “Trying to find out if we were going to take you up on your offer?”

  “My offer?”

  “Yeah, you know to fuck us both.” It came out harsher than I’d quite meant it. But I was confused by everything she’d done and said. Coupled with all the other screwed up shit that was going on, I couldn’t be delicate and polite.

  “I only said that because…” She sighed. “Look, he stopped talking about leaving you behind, didn’t he?”

  “That’s why you said it?”

  “Um… maybe?”

  “I think you were serious,” I said.

  She took a shaky breath. “Emmett and Milo are both gone now. Just two days ago, they were both here. They were walking and talking and with us. And now they… aren’t. How does that even work? How can that…?”

  “Would you have fucked Milo too?”

  “You’re mad at me,” she said.

  I sighed. “I’m not…” I rolled over on my back. “I’m sorry you had to see them die. I’m sorry you’re here. I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  “You didn’t mean to,” she said. She touched my arm. “Please don’t be mad at me, Silas. Please don’t. If you’re mad at me, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Why’d you do that to me last night?”

  She was quiet.

  “Christa?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Seriously? People are dying left and right, and you’re talking about threesomes, and you’re waking me up giving me a hand job. What is wrong with you?”

  “I thought you wanted it.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “I realize that now. I’m sorry. I just never had a guy get mad at me for getting him off. And back in Morgantown, you were really into me—�
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  “And you were really not into me,” I said. “You kicked me out of Griffin’s apartment when I kissed you. Then it’s like this switch goes off, and you’re all about my dick for some reason. But this is the exact wrong time for that shit.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s it? You’re not going to explain anything?”

  “I don’t know. I like to feel wanted, okay? I like to feel good. And everything feels bad right now. So, I guess I just thought…”

  I massaged the bridge of my nose. Actually, maybe I was being too hard on her. She was going through a hellish sort of experience right now, and I was dictating how she should react to it. Everything around us was insane. Maybe it was driving her insane too. “Okay, okay,” I muttered. “Maybe we should forget about it.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I’m going to get us out of this one way or another. We’re going to go home. We should think about that.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, um, what are you going to do when you get home?”

  “Mmm…” she considered. “I’m going to go to Sonic. Do you guys have Sonic in West Virginia?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s one in Morgantown. But, uh, I don’t know if I’ve ever been there.”

  “They’re really awesome,” she said. “You can get tater tots smothered in cheese. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to Sonic and get a bacon cheeseburger on toast—they put onion rings on it, you know—and cheesy tater tots and a Coke, but you can put flavors in the drinks, so I think I’ll get vanilla and cherry. Or maybe chocolate and raspberry. And I’m going to eat and drink all of that. And then when I’m done, I’m going to order more food.”

  I sighed. “That sounds amazing.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s funny because I always took stuff like that for granted. And I thought that fast food was evil, because it was bad for you. But right now, I don’t care about stuff like that.”

  I laughed a little. “Yeah, bad-for-you food would be really awesome right now.”

  “Right,” she said. “Because it fills you up. If I had a Sonic meal right now, I’d be good for days. I would be so full. It would be absolutely awesome. What are you going to do when you get home?”

  “Eat,” I said. “And drink a beer.”

  “Oh,” she groaned. “Beer. I almost forgot about beer. I want beer too.”

  “Maybe a nice stout,” I said. “Or a wheat beer. Or an amber ale.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I forgot that you liked beer,” I said, smiling. “That’s a little strange for a nineteen-year-old chick, you know. Most underage girls think beer’s gross.”

  “That’s only because they’ve never had good beer,” she said. “I had this thing with a guy who owned a brewery once. Totally spoiled me.”

  “A thing?” I said. “Like he was your boyfriend?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I don’t really do boyfriends.”

  “Of course not. You don’t do boyfriends, but threesomes are no big deal,” I said. Then I immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry. I said we’d forget about it.”

  She propped herself up on an elbow. “You’ve never had one?”

  I winced. “That’s not the point.”

  “So, it’s okay for you to have threesomes,” she said. “But not me? Or is it only okay to have two-girl, one-boy threesomes, and not two-guy, one-girl?”

  I sat up. “All right, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you were so hot for Emmett, the dude who killed his wife and is practically old enough to be your father.”

  “He wasn’t that old,” she said. “And he only killed two people. How many people have you killed?”

  “I never killed anyone that I didn’t have to kill.”

  She shrugged. “That many, huh?”

  I was feeling tense. “You know, he was probably thirty-five.”

  “Well, if so, then he would have been fourteen when I was born. That’s not really old enough to be my dad.”

  I glared at her. “Fourteen years is a ridiculous age difference.”

  “Well, given the situation—”

  “Given the situation, the last fucking thing on your mind should be sex.”

  She sighed.

  I rubbed my face. “You know what, it’s not really about whether you have threesomes or not, or how you’re fine with having anal sex as long as there’s lube, it’s about…” If I was being honest, both of those things were kind of awesome. “Did you actually want to have sex with him?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Fuck it,” I muttered, pushing out from the underbrush.

  “You know, Silas, maybe you really do want me,” she said. “Maybe that’s why you don’t want to think about me with Emmett.”

  I started to get up. “I’m finding someplace else to sleep.”

  She grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t. Please?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry that I said anything,” she said. “Just… I don’t want to sleep alone. I keep seeing them dying, Silas. I keep seeing both of them dying.”

  I sank back down next to her.

  “I promise not to touch you,” she whispered. “But don’t leave me alone.”

  * * *

  I woke up to a pounding headache. My mouth was dry, and I felt really thirsty.

  Christa was already awake, sitting a few feet away from me outside of the brambles we’d slept under. She was hugging her knees to her chest. “I feel hungover,” she said by way of greeting.

  I pushed myself out from underneath the branches as well. “We’re dehydrated. We didn’t drink much water yesterday. Probably the only thing we got was from those berries.”

  “Yeah, I figured that out, genius.” Her voice was cutting. “I actually have been spending the morning looking for water. Can’t find anything.”

  “There’s got to be water somewhere,” I said. “Before, we didn’t have any problem finding some.”

  “Before, we were walking along the same path as that stream,” she said. “Yesterday, we went in the complete opposite direction of it.”

  I wandered a few feet away, turned my back to her, and unzipped my pants to take a piss.

  “Can you like go somewhere further away to do that?” she said, clearly annoyed.

  “Yes, hide your blushing eyes.” But nothing much came out anyway. I really was dehydrated. I zipped back up.

  She stood up. “We have to go back to the stream, Silas. We have to go back the way we came.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “No way. We walked all day to get away from the hunters. They lost them. You want to walk right back to them?”

  “We need water,” she said. “That’s the only place we saw it.”

  “It’ll take us a day to get back there,” I said.

  “We need water.”

  “I don’t even know how to do that,” I said. “I wasn’t paying attention to where we were walking.”

  “I was,” she said. “We walked north. I watched the sun. I’m pretty sure if we go south again, we’ll run into that stream.”

  I sighed. “It’s going to take a day.”

  “I’m thirsty,” she said.

  I was thirsty too. “There’s got to be water somewhere else.”

  “There’s not,” she said. “I’ve been walking around all over.”

  “There’s got to be,” I said.

  * * *

  An hour later, I conceded that there wasn’t any water. I was beginning to feel really weak. The sun was hotter today than it had been, and walking around caused a lot of effort.

  We found some more berries, and we ate as many of them as we could, sucking the scant amount of liquid out of them.

  It wasn’t enough, but it was something.

  My belly full of berries, I finally gave in. “Okay, we’ll go back to the stream.”

  “I don’t want to do it either, Silas,” she said. “
But we need water.” She eyed me. “Well, I need it anyway. Can you die from dehydration?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that I figured I probably couldn’t. But I wasn’t sure, of course. My body needed water to survive. If I didn’t have any, I was pretty sure I’d be worthless, even if I was technically still alive.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Which way’s south?”

  She glared at me. “Seriously?”

  I shrugged self-consciously.

  She rolled her eyes. “Just follow me.”

  * * *

  By mid afternoon, we’d been walking all day. We hadn’t found any more berries or anything else that we could eat. And, of course, no water.

  We were tired. I felt like my body could hardly move. It was a struggle just to put one foot in front of the other. But I pressed on because it was the only way we were going to find water.

  To save energy, we didn’t talk.

  But at one point, I looked up, and we were walking directly into the afternoon sun.

  “Um, Christa?” I said. My voice was hoarse.

  “What?” Her voice didn’t sound too good either.

  “I know you’re like the navigator or whatever, but we’re not walking south right now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I pointed at the sun. “We’re walking west. We’re walking right at the sun.”

  She looked up at it. “No, we’re not.”

  “Actually, we are.”

  She rounded on me, her hands on her hips. “Silas, you’re completely stupid in the woods, so maybe you just shut up.”

  That made me mad. “I’m not great with direction out here in the middle of nowhere. But I know that when you’re walking towards the sun, and it’s afternoon, you’re walking west.”

  “Look,” she said. “We couldn’t keep going directly south because there was that big briar patch back there. We’re going around it.”

  “We passed that thing ages ago,” I said.

  “Stop arguing with me,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “How could you?” I said. “How could either of us? We’re both thirsty and tired and hungry and scared and terrorized. I don’t think it would be hard for either of us to get confused.”