David Baldacci: Deliver Us From Evil

“Knife against guns?” said Whit.

“Best we can do. Now let’s see if we can find a phone or anything that’ll let us call for help.”

They didn’t. No land line, no cell phone, not even a walkie-talkie or a computer.

“Shaw!”

It was Reggie standing just inside the front door; Rice was next to her.

She said, “Trucks are coming. We have to get out of here.”

They ran to the back of the house and outside. Beams of headlights cut through the darkness. One truck, no idea how many men were inside. Shaw thought quickly. “We need wheels,” he said.

Reggie looked around and pointed to her left. “Whit can take Rice and Katie off that way and hide behind that berm. You and I can double back, grab the wheels, and take whatever weapons if any they have in there. Then we pick the others up and get the hell out of here.”

“Okay,” agreed Shaw.

Whit led Katie and Rice to the raised mound of earth behind the house. Shaw went around one side of the cabin and Reggie the other. Four men climbed out of the truck and headed to the house. Shaw knew they only had at best thirty seconds before they discovered Katie was not there.

He raced toward the truck. Reggie did the same on the other side.

“Shit,” Shaw muttered. They’d locked the doors. He peered inside the window. No keys dangling conveniently in the ignition. He saw no guns either. Reggie joined him.

“Even if I can break the glass, it’s not like you can easily hot-wire cars these days. And-”

They both heard it at the same time. Shouts from inside the house. They’d found out Katie was gone.

“Come on, Shaw!” Reggie exclaimed. “We have to run for it.”

“Go, go,” he said, pushing her off into a sprint.

She looked back once and then was gone around the side of the cabin.

“If we don’t have wheels neither will you,” Shaw said. He used the knife to slash the two right-side tires before running off. Seconds later the front door flew open and the men poured out, guns ready. Some ran to opposite sides of the cabin and fired out into the darkness with their submachine guns. Bullets whizzed over Shaw’s head but he kept going. He doubted they could actually see him. And there was little chance that their MP5s could intentionally hit him at this distance, but they could get lucky. He reached the others and they ran as hard as they could away from the cabin. But they clearly heard the frustrated curses of the men when the truck started and then wobbled forward on the trashed tires.

Shaw leading the way, they made a wide circle around the property and headed back west. Within five minutes the lights from the cabin had disappeared from their vision.

“Close,” said Shaw as they finally stopped running. “Too close and we got zip for our troubles.”

“Where to now?” Rice said.

Shaw answered. “Now we’re behind them. They won’t expect that.”

“Yes they will. They’ll know we’ve been there because she’s gone,” Reggie shot back as she hooked a thumb in Katie’s direction.

Shaw stared first at Reggie, then at Katie, and then back at Reggie. “What, do you want us to take her back?”

Reggie blanched. “Of course not!”

“Then we’ll just have to make the best of it.”

Whit cut in, “And how the hell do we do that? Sneak up and attack them with kitchenware?”

“I thought you’d figured that out. Our goal is not to engage them. It’s to get away and find help. We didn’t get the wheels so now we have to look for an alternate. If I have my bearings right and the coast is over that way, then if we head due south we’ll run into the Belle Strait. This time of year there will be ships coming through that channel going to and from Europe. If we can survive until daylight we may be able to attract the crew on one of them. They can send out a boat for us.”

“Sounds reasonable,” said Reggie.

Katie looked at Shaw. “I expect at some point you’ll tell me what all this is about?”

“At some point, but not now.” He gripped her arm. “But at some point, yeah. I certainly owe you that.”

Reggie watched as Katie placed her hand overtop of Shaw’s. Then she looked away.

They had gone nearly a mile when the sound shattered the silence and all their plans ended up for naught.

ALAN RICE screamed and grabbed his leg where the heavy-caliber round had ripped into his flesh and shattered his femur. He fell hard, rolled, and came to a stop against a small boulder. Shaw grabbed Katie and threw her facedown behind an elevated stretch of ground. Whit and Reggie took cover too. Shaw peered over the top of the mound.

“Anybody see the muzzle flash?” he called out.

Nobody had.

“Rice,” he shouted. “Get behind that chunk of rock.”

“My damn leg is broken,” he screamed back.

“You’ll have more broken if you don’t get behind that rock.”

Crawling on his belly, Rice had almost made it to the rock when another round slammed into his shoulder.

“Shit!” Shaw jumped up and ran in zigzags to Rice and pulled him behind the rock. The man was bleeding heavily from both wounds and drifting in and out of consciousness from the pain. The break was a compound one, the pale snapped bone sticking out of his thigh. If it had ripped the femoral artery on the way out, Rice was dead, Shaw knew. Using his knife he tore a length of cloth off his jumpsuit and made a crude tourniquet for Rice’s leg, cranking it down just above the thigh. The blood flow ebbed a bit. But only a bit.

“Am I going to die?” gasped Rice as he came to.

“Look, I’m going to try and get you out of here. Can you stand?”

“He’ll just shoot us,” yelled Rice. “He’ll just shoot us both dead.”

Shaw looked down at him. The man was going into shock and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He froze with the sound of the dogs. Only this time it wasn’t baying. It was snarls and paralyzing growls that made every hair on the back of Shaw’s neck go vertical. He eased his head over the top of the boulder to see.

“Shaw!” screamed Katie and Reggie together.

Two of the largest, fiercest dogs Shaw had ever seen were bearing down on his location at speed. They bounded over the rough terrain like it was level high-pile carpet.

“Shaw, run!” yelled Reggie.

Shaw held his knife tightly, processing through the possible scenarios as fast as he could. He stood but kept in a squat because he didn’t know if the dogs were a ploy to get him in range for a killing round. He looked over the rock again in time to see the first dog leap. Shaw slashed with the knife, catching the two-hundred-pound beast across its massive chest and opening a gaping but unfortunately largely superficial wound. He used his free hand to lever the airborne animal into a tight arc, and it hit the ground hard, but didn’t stay down.

With a speed and agility that no human could match, the dog rolled, gained purchase on the rocky dirt, turned in a split second, accelerated on its four legs, and collided with Shaw, chest to chest. He went down, his own blood from one of the dog’s canines ripping into his arm mingled with the blood from the dog’s chest wound. Shaw was up again in an instant because lying on the ground he had no chance. His fist collided with the animal’s snout once and then twice, momentarily stunning it. The impacts sent stingers all the way up Shaw’s arm and into the tight mass of muscles on his shoulder. He cut with the knife one more time, the beast let out a whine, and then Shaw jumped over the boulder and ran, his feet slipping in the loose dirt.

He tensed for the rifle round hitting him in the back or else the dog attacking him from behind. In his mind he saw it pulling him down, the jaws, the stench of breath in his face as the dog bit into his neck, following an ages-old instinctual tactic it knew would rip the big blood vessels and kill the prey. None of it would be less than a nightmare.