Chapter 35 #2
But they had her name on their tongues. They would hurt her if she were even still alive. I was so stupid. So fucking stupid. I should’ve never let Graham split us up. I should’ve protected her more.
“Exit the vehicle,” the voice snapped.
My feet moved on their own. The door slammed shut behind me, and I was immersed in total darkness.
I couldn’t see a fucking thing. It was dark, darker than I remembered. I had been here just a few hours before. But it all felt different, now.
A gloved hand shoved something into my palm. I lifted the mask and found an earpiece clipped to a radio. My hands shook as I jammed the earpiece in and secured the radio to my waistband. I slid the mask back down, my breath fogging the inside.
The woman’s voice was right in my ear. “Good job. Time to choose your weapon.”
The illumination from an overhead floodlight stabbed down through the trees. I blinked against the glare and peered through the skull’s eyeholes. A table sat in the clearing: a knife, a pistol, and a battered wooden bat.
“Notably, the gun only holds one bullet. Choose wisely.” Her tone was clinical, patient.
Something rustled at the tree line.
A snap of twigs.
A footstep on rocks.
The forest sounded alive with teeth.
I was about to enter a game of catch-or-die.
A flicker of shock burned through me.
I stared at the weapons. The bat was honest, brute force I could handle. The gun was quick and final. The knife was close, personal, but it reminded me too much of Mackenzie, and my hand shook thinking of grabbing it.
My fingers itched. I wanted the bat. I grabbed it, spun it, felt the steady weight in my hands.
“Good,” the voice said. “If you fail, you will never leave these woods.”
“What?” My voice cracked.
“Tick tock. One hour, or she dies.”
My heart detonated. My fingers tightened on the bat until I could feel my knuckles whiten under the gloves.
“You’re threatening my wife?” I shouted into the dark, turning in a slow circle. “You think that scares me? I’ll kill for her. Including you.”
“That’s what we hope for,” she replied.
“What about the FBI? This is federally protected territory. Someone will save me.” I tried to sound defiant, but the words tasted hollow.
I was scared.
Really fucking scared.
But I didn’t want them to know that.
A soft laugh came through the speaker. “Camp Blackshear is Alliance territory now.”
The world dropped out from under me. Panic hit like ice. My throat closed, and beads of sweat began to slick the inside of the mask.
“Good luck,” she said, and the crackle of the channel closing echoed in my ear.
The floodlight snapped off.
Darkness swallowed me whole. The forest pressed in tightly, thick with silence. My pulse roared in my ears.
But I knew these woods. I could outsmart them. Could I?
I forced myself forward, one step at a time. The bat was heavy in my grip, slick with sweat. Every sound, the crunch of dead leaves, the rasp of my breath, felt too loud. Blood squished in my shoes.
Then, there was light.
A red flare hissed in the distance. Then another. Then a third.
They were leading me somewhere.
I followed the trail, muscles coiled and ready. The air grew colder the deeper I went, the scent of lake water sharp in my lungs.
Halfway there, a distorted scream exploded through my earpiece.
“Max! Max, please! Save me!”
I froze. My heart stopped.
“Mackenzie?”
“Max, please! He’s coming! Please save me!”
I started running. Branches tore at my arms, shadows bleeding into motion around me.
“Trouble!” I shouted. “Trouble! Where are you?!”
Her voice looped in my ear.
“Max, help me! Please help me!”
Over and over, louder, and closer, her voice tortured me. She was right ahead, and everywhere.
Each scream splintered deeper under my skin until I couldn’t tell what was real anymore. Had they taken her? Was this a trick?
Her voice hit another pitch. It was raw, broken, and pleading.
And it shattered me.
It was torture. I wasn’t running anymore; I was sprinting through hell to get to her.
I stumbled into the clearing. Moonlight skated across the lake. In the center, strapped to a chair, was Jackson.
He looked like someone had used his face as a punching bag.
There were purple and black bruises mottled on his skin, one eye swollen shut.
His white shirt was dark with blood; red grooves marked his wrists where zip ties had bitten in.
His left arm was fucked. A deep, jagged gash split through his forearm, crudely wrapped in blood-soaked gauze.
It looked like someone had taken a chainsaw to it.
He was pale as a ghost, sweat beading across his brow.
The voice in my ear came cold and clinical. I flinched.
“This is your trial, Mr. McKinnon. Kill him, or she dies.”
I went rigid, then began to pace the bank, the bat a heavy metronome in my hands. Jackson lay slumped, out cold, until the voice cut in again.
“What are you waiting for? Eliminate the target!”
My hands trembled around the bat.
“Oh, fuck,” I breathed.
The voice started counting. “Ten… nine… eight…”
I had thought about killing Jackson several times, but now that the opportunity was here, I couldn’t do it.
On the last syllable, one, Jackson’s head lolled up.
He blinked, then stared into the eyes of my mask, as if he could see straight through it. He knew it was me. I could see the recognition all over his face.
A slow, ugly grin crawled across his blood-streaked mouth.
“Max… I told you, you couldn’t handle her.”
He spat blood all over the ground, giving me a smug smile. The anger pulsed through me.
“By the way, I was worried she would feel used up by the time I got her back. But she felt awfully nice in the woods. Still so fucking tight.”
I nearly dropped the bat when I heard that.
“What did you say?” My voice trembled, my legs shaking.
“She didn’t fight me after I hurt her. I loved every minute of it.”
I pulled my mask off, wind rushing through my hair. All hesitation was gone now. A darkness spread through my body, and a heavy feeling of hatred pulsed through my veins.
I wanted him to see my face when I killed him. I lifted the bat, my hands shaking with rage, my heart hammering against my ribs. Time slowed. The world narrowed to the swing, to him, to the choice I had to make.
“This is for her.”
I swung.
The bat felt like thunder in my hands. The first hit folded him. Jackson’s smug face contorted as if surprised I did it. Blood splattered all over my vest as he let out a yelp that was swallowed by the pounding in my ears.
From that moment on, my mind went blank. I only felt. I could feel her. Crying. Smiling. Laughing.
His head was slumped over as he tried to gather his breath.
The second hit was uglier. Wood met jaw, and Jackson’s knees buckled as he fell forward out of the chair.
His hands clawed for the ground as if he could sink into the dirt and hide.
There were sounds I’d never heard from him—raw, animal noises—until I drove the bat against his kneecaps, and he stiffened with a loud groan.
Around us, the world narrowed. I wasn’t Max anymore. I was someone else.
The man behind the mask.
I was him.
When Jackson tried to push up, his face smeared with blood, his eyes wild and unfocused, I hit him one more time. The bat cracked against his temple, and the sneer drained from his face as I beat it in like a pulp.
The screams I made echoed through the trees. He folded like old paper as I beat him.
I stood over him, chest heaving, the taste of adrenaline metallic in my mouth. Jackson wasn’t breathing.
Had I killed him?
Someone grabbed my arm, tearing the bat down, pulling me back, but I was already somewhere else.
My mind was in a place where only anger lived.
My vision tunneled; the edges of sound stretched thin and distant.
Mackenzie’s voice cut through the haze like a knife, and it was the only thing I had left to hold onto as the darkness rolled over me like a wave.
Everything went black.
When I woke up, I was in my house at GCU, the one I had rented for Mackenzie and me. I was completely clean. Not a single speck of blood.
I groaned as I tried to sit up.
“What the fuck happened?” I groaned. My eyes fluttered open and closed as I tried to regain some sense of composure.
My whole body felt like it was about to shatter. I looked around the room. Everything was in its place—my sheets on the bed, my things on the dresser.
Baseballs. Awards. Stacks of textbooks. It was exactly the way I would’ve set it up. If I had actually done it.
When the hell did this happen?
I tried to pull the covers off me, but a soft ping from my phone on the nightstand made me freeze. That sould shouldn’t have been the scariest thing, but it was. I stiffened and snatched up the phone, my thumb clumsy on the screen.
I checked the date.
August 15.
My birthday.
Amazing.
One week had passed since Blackshear.
I had been out for a whole week. Gone. I had no one to call. No one to talk to about this. There were days missing in my head. Days ripped out like paper. My injuries were still all over my body from the glass, but I was bandaged and healing.
Somebody had patched me up.
Did the Alliance heal my wounds? Had they carried me in here, stepped over my shit, and tucked me into bed like a joke? I hadn’t even moved in yet. How did all my stuff get here in the first place?
A cold feeling slid down my spine. They’d been in my house. In my room. They knew exactly how I would set things up.
Another ping from my phone jolted me out of my thoughts.
The message lit my screen.
You’ve survived. The real game begins soon.
My stomach dropped. Before I could even breathe, another notification hit. A photo downloaded, filling the screen.
Mackenzie.
She was on the back of a motorcycle, arms wrapped tight around some guy’s middle. Helmet on. No face I could see. Just her body pressed into his. I knew it was her. The way her shoulders were hunched forward, the way she held onto him.
Was this the guy who had checked her out from camp? Her brother?
I screamed.
The sound bounced off the walls. My hands shook so hard I almost dropped my phone.
I looked down at my other hand, at my wedding ring. My fingers trembled. My chest burned with jealousy and fear and something darker, something that felt a lot like the man in the mask back in the woods.
They had her.
They were using her.
I didn’t care who got in my way; I would find her.
Even if it meant dying to get her back.
I just didn’t realize the price wasn’t my life.
It was Max McKinnon.