Brian Freeman - Thief River Falls

He ran right into her open arms. She scooped him up and held him, but there was no time for desperate relief. More footsteps were coming fast. Heavy footsteps. She pushed through the wall of elderberries beside her, with her arms still wrapped around the boy. The branches scratched her face and made a deep, painful cut across her collarbone. She buried herself in the foliage and sank to her knees, hoping the camouflage of the brush made them invisible. She clapped a hand over Purdue’s mouth and put a finger to her lips to silence him. She could feel his hot breath on her palm and feel his chest going in and out as she held him tightly. The blood pulsed on her shoulder.

She put her mouth to his ear and murmured, “Shhhh...”

The footsteps slowed as they got closer. Purdue shook with fear, and she was afraid he would rattle the branches and give them away. Through the dense elderberries, she could see a sliver of the man’s face and body. It was the ginger man, the man from the market, the torturer who had cut off someone’s fingers. Liam. His hand held a fierce black pistol, and she could smell smoke leaching from the barrel. He stopped directly in front of them on the trail, almost close enough to touch if she reached through the branches. She was conscious of the stark whiteness of her vest, but the leaves were packed thickly together, hiding them. He was in the light, and they were in the darkness.

Purdue had his eyes closed. His face was pressed against her chest.

Lisa watched and waited. The man could feel their presence, because he didn’t move. His gun was level at his hip, ready to fire. The slightest sound would betray them, and she didn’t know how long the boy could stay still.

Then, from deep in the woods, something rescued them. A bird. A rabbit. A deer. An animal of some kind rustled the brush, and the man heard it and ran back the way he’d come. When he was gone, Lisa bolted from cover. There was no hiding the sound as she broke free of the elderberries, but she hoped the man was too busy running to hear them. She picked up Purdue, and he clung to her neck and wrapped his bony legs around her waist, and she ran. The boy wasn’t heavy, but she couldn’t go fast, and she couldn’t even look behind her to see if the man was laying chase. She stumbled along the trail, past the dead tree and the crows, past the lakeshore and the cattails, through the mud and into the clearing where her pickup was parked.

The passenger door was still open. She piled Purdue inside and dashed to the opposite door to get in. She cast one last look behind her, and there was the red-haired man breaking from the muddy trail. She turned on the engine and jammed down the accelerator, making the tires scream and the chassis swerve as they shot away from him. He ran after them, then stopped to raise his gun and aim it at the back of the truck. She cried out and grabbed Purdue’s shoulder and pulled the boy down, but the gunshot went wild.

She sped through a curve on the access road, leaving the man behind her. Not even half a mile later, she swerved out of the park at high speed. The man’s white Malibu was parked on the opposite shoulder of the road near the dam. She hit the brakes hard and screeched to a stop right next to the car. She rolled down her window. Trying to keep her arm steady, she pulled back the slide on her Ruger and pointed the gun out the window, aiming at the left front tire of the Malibu.

She squeezed off a shot.

And missed.

And then another shot. This time, the tire exploded, and the car jolted downward, its rim clanging against the asphalt. She eyed the mirror one last time. The man was behind her again, running. He sprinted for them down the middle of the park road, but he was too far away to fire, and he wasn’t going anywhere in his sedan now.

Lisa rolled up the window. The interior of the pickup smelled burnt from the gunfire. She floored the accelerator, and they took off down the highway into the freezing rain.

Five miles passed in a haze before Lisa’s emotions got the better of her and she broke down. She felt utterly unprepared for what was happening to her, but she couldn’t allow herself to feel that way for long. She had to let it out and move on. She pulled off the dirt road, cupped both hands over her face, and sobbed. Her shoulders shook as fear and relief poured out of her. Her neck stung with pain, and when she looked down, she realized that the cut across her collarbone was still bleeding and had made a crimson stain as it soaked through her shirt and into her white vest. Seeing the blood brought a wave of nausea.

She felt like a different person. A changed person. Hiding in the elderberries, watching that man hunting for Purdue, she’d realized something frightening about herself. She was capable of violence. She was capable of killing, just like the people she wrote about in her books. If that man had come for the boy, she would have pulled the trigger. She was prepared to defend this child with her life if she had to. And she would take the life of anyone who got in her way.

“I’m sorry.”

Next to her, Purdue’s voice was full of misery.

Lisa wiped her face and tried to get hold of herself. She looked across the car and could hardly see Purdue through her tears. He was a boy made up of watercolors, the paint running in the rain. “You? You don’t have anything to feel sorry about.”

“This is all my fault.”

“No. Don’t say things like that. I don’t know whose fault it is, but it’s not yours.”

Her words didn’t seem to give him any comfort. She understood. The worst things in the world could happen to a child, and they would take it all on themselves. It didn’t matter where the evil came from. A bad man. A terrible accident. A cruel disease. A child could be on his deathbed and still apologize for the pain in someone else’s face. Don’t be sad...

“You need to send me away,” he told her. “I should go.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“All I’m doing is causing you trouble.”

Lisa cupped his chin with her hand and spoke slowly to try to get him to hear her. “That’s not true. I don’t want you feeling that way.”

He shook his head. “Why are you helping me?”

The thought sprang into her mind: Because I need to be saved every bit as much as you.

But she didn’t say that.

“Because you need help,” Lisa replied. “That’s what my mother taught me. If someone needs help, you drop everything, and you help them. Just like you hope they would do for you.”

“But what are we going to do?” the boy asked. “They’re trying to kill me. That means they’ll kill you, too. I don’t want that.”

Lisa stared through the sleet at the miles of empty fields. This remote region, so bitter and harsh, had always been home to her, but at this moment, it felt like foreign ground.

“We’re leaving,” she said.

“For where?”

“I’m not sure yet, but it’s not safe to stay here anymore. We need to get out of this place. I need a couple of minutes at home to get a bandage on my neck and change clothes, and then we’ll hit the road. How does that sound?”

A smile crept onto the boy’s face. “That sounds good.”

“Okay, then.”

Lisa checked her mirror, then steered from the shoulder onto the lonely dirt road. They didn’t have far to go. Two more miles led them back to the highway that went past her house. She turned into the teeth of the precipitation that streaked from the sky. It was getting colder, and the pavement already felt slippery under her tires. She drove south with the railroad tracks and the telephone poles keeping her company.

When she was a quarter mile from her house, she drifted to a stop in the middle of the highway lane. There was no traffic in either direction to be concerned about. She leaned forward, trying to see her house, wanting to make sure no one was waiting for them. If the police had come back, they’d already been there and left again. The land was empty. Her house looked sterile and abandoned.