9. Benji
9
BENJI
F ucking hell. This is not what’s supposed to be going on here. We’re supposed to be heading toward the motel, aiming for safety, but hell has come for us. I know that this is one of the gang members, I can see it in his eyes. He’s the enemy, and we ran right into him. I ran right into him. I let Cassie down by taking her toward danger, not away from it.
“You’re them.” The man runs his eyes all over us. “Oh, my God, you are the ones they’re looking for.”
He starts yelling as I spin around to take a glimpse at Cassie. All the color has completely drained from her face. She knows what’s happening here, she knows that I’ve betrayed her and let her down without even meaning to. I hate that haunted look on her face. It makes me want to lose my shit, but I have to stay in control here. Normally, I’m good at staying in control, but now I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. There are emotions which I can’t control, and they’re fogging up my judgement. How is that happening? I never normally have any feelings which will get in the way of my actions, but something about being with Cassie…
I don’t know what it is. I can’t control or contain it. It’s agonizing. I need to make it right. This moment, more than ever before, needs to work out. There’s so much more riding on this than there has been on anything else, and it’s when I’m fucking up most.
“Guys!” the man yells into an old-fashioned-looking cellphone device. “Guys, I have them. You need to come here. No, the Jones chick isn’t alone, she’s with some guy. Someone else we’re going to have to kill off. Another body to burn.”
The way these assholes talk about human life as if it’s nothing… it’s horrific. They seem to get some kind of enjoyment from murder and death. And this idiot is getting more of them to come to me and Cassie. I’m pretty sure that one of them is coming now, I can hear the sound of footsteps off in the distance, getting ever closer to us. We need to act now.
I glance back at Cassie, trying to reassure her with my eyes, but she doesn’t seem to get it. She doesn’t seem to want to let me go, either, but she’s going to have to. I can’t drag her along with me when I fight. I think knocking this asshole out is going to beat shooting him and making an unnecessary racket with the gunshot. I’m trying to think fast, but also smart.
I shake Cassie off. I hate doing it when she so clearly needs to hold on to me, but I’m hoping that she’ll understand why when it’s all over. When this guy is down and we can start racing for the motel again. It isn’t too far from here… actually, it’s really close to here. Thinking about it, the gang might know where we’re going… oh, but I’ll deal with that later. First things first.
I leap high and onto the man, shocking him and knocking him backward. I have the element of surprise working for me. He staggers backward and drops his cellphone right at the moment I slam the butt of the gun into his head.
“Ah, fuck!” he screams, or at least he tries to, but his voice is strangled and weak. The curses keep flying out of his mouth as I slam the gun into his temple over and over again until he’s silenced. I don’t think he’s dead, but he can’t keep me and Cassie trapped, either. We can keep on going. At least I think we can until the other man descends upon us. The one I heard before coming toward us through the jungle. This isn’t over, not yet, anyway. We still need to fight…
Fuck, I’m going to have to shoot this one. I have no choice but to get rid of him rapidly. More needless death will have to happen because if Cassie and I don’t run away now, we don’t stand a chance of survival. We don’t have a chance in hell. I glance over to Cassie to try and see if she will hate me for this and think a lot less of me, but she isn’t even looking. Her eyes are on the floor. It’s almost as if she doesn’t quite know how to accept what’s going on. This is a bizarre situation to me, and I’ve been through things like this before. I’ve seen the worst areas of the world and survived just fine. But Cassie, she’s been sheltered. She’s been living under a freaking rock when it comes to shit like this. No wonder she’s a mess.
I lift the gun and pull the trigger the moment a new face comes into view. I don’t even think he sees me and Cassie. I don’t give him a chance. He’s gone before there’s even a moment for us to make eye contact. The bullet tears right through him and he slumps to the floor, a little like Alex did only a little while before. Two in one fucking day. This isn’t going well.
“Cassie.” I don’t want to have to force her out of her comfort zone again, but I don’t want that guy to die for nothing. I shot him so that we can run, and now we really need to. We’re going to have to take a different direction as well. As much as I want the comfort of the motel, and I’m pretty sure that Cassie must feel the same way, we can’t be tracked. “Come on.”
This time, Cassie doesn’t take my hand, but she does run fast. There’s a definite shift in the air between us, but I know better than to worry about what’s going on inside her mind. We have too much else to worry about and I need to zone in on those tracking skills of mine since I can’t use a map. I need to get us away from those men but somewhere I know where we are.
It’s a challenge, though, I’ll be honest about that much. I’m finding it harder than I should to stop myself from panicking about Cassie and her feelings toward me. I definitely shouldn’t care about her hating me, but I do. I can’t stop myself. I ache for her to like me, to want to be closer to me, to hold on to me like there’s no tomorrow. I miss when she wanted me.
Stop it, I growl at myself as the frustration gets to me. Stop thinking about this. Stop it, it’s weird.
It’s because I feel like I know Cassie, because I’ve read up on snippets of her life in a file that Max gave to me. It isn’t even from her point of view, so I can’t judge anything about her. I certainly don’t know her well enough to feel anything for her. And just because she’s a beautiful woman isn’t a good enough reason. There are lots of beautiful women in the world, even if they don’t captivate me in the way that Cassie did right from the very first moment I laid eyes on her. In the pictures, and in real life.
“Where are we going?” she asks me quietly, her ragged breaths falling hard and fast out of her mouth. “The motel?”
“Not the motel.” I hate telling her this, but I have to let her know the change in plan. “Not right yet. I know we want to get back there, but we can’t. We were near the motel then, but those guys saw us. I have a feeling the gang will track us that way.”
Her breath catches in her throat and she pauses for a moment. “So, we’re going away from the motel right now?”
“We have to,” I let her know firmly. “We don’t have any choice in the matter. I know that isn’t exactly ideal…”
“Ideal? No, this is a nightmare.” She throws her hands in the air in frustration. “I can’t seem to get home. Every time I think that I might be headed in the right direction, the gang throws me further into the jungle. The hope makes it worse. When I know with utter certainty that I’m going to die, then it’s one thing. But getting hope and losing it is another. It’s too much, I can’t stand it.” She clutches onto her stomach and holds it hard. “I can’t handle this anymore.”
“Don’t lose hope.” I can’t tell whether she wants me to or not, but I take her shoulders in my hands and stare into her eyes. “Don’t lose hope because I’m going to get you out of here. I have a plan in place. I know what we’re going to do.” I swing my bag in her direction and smile at her. “I have everything that we could possibly need in here. We’re going to be just fine.”
She doesn’t look convinced, but I know that we have everything under control. Max and his excellent planning win out all over again. Inside this backpack I have food, water, a tent, camping equipment… anything and everything we could need. I wasn’t fully intending to camp in the jungle, but I brought all of this stuff here with me for a reason, just because I knew that anything could go wrong at any moment and it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Cassie and I will have to hide out some more.
“Are you sure we’re going to be fine?” she whispers sadly. “Because I’m really struggling to believe that.”
“Trust me.” I take her hands in mine and smile. I just want her to see that I have her. Even now, even still. “I get that you don’t know me, and I haven’t exactly done the best job for you, but I’ll keep you alive. I’ll get you home.”
Then I’ll be going home too, I suppose. That’s a place which right now feels a million miles from where I am. I might have lived there for a big chunk of my life, but it feels like a distant memory. Right now, this is all that’s real, Cassie and me, fighting for our survival, needing to stay alive no matter what happens. Her face is the only thing I can see. Her face, her soulful eyes, the way that her eyelashes flutter when she talks… I might not know her in the way that I think I do, but the parts of her that I do know, I feel strongly for. The power that Cassie has over me is crazy. It’s everything.
I don’t know what that’s going to translate into, but if it powers us both to keep us alive, then that’s something.
“Okay, so you are going to get me home,” she says all defeated, not that I’m falling for it. She still doesn’t buy anything that I’m saying to her. I can almost see the cogs ticking around in her brain, and she’s trying to accept the death that’s, in her mind, coming for her. “But until then, we are going to keep running so that no one can find us in this jungle.”
“Right, exactly.” I nod slowly. “Which doesn’t sound too hard, does it? It’s a massive place, so we should be able to find somewhere to hide within it. Somewhere they can’t find us. So, we should get moving quickly.”
She lets me take her hand, and we move rapidly. Not quite running, but not really walking, either. Determination surges through me with every step because now more than ever, I know that I need to keep us both safe.