Ryan Westfield - Pushing On

They still had their packs with them, and they were heavy. They couldn’t have left them back in the clearing, for fear that someone would take them.

After half an hour, John and Cynthia were exhausted. They stopped for a moment. Both were panting with exertion, and sweating profusely. Sweating meant losing a lot of water. So far they’d tried to avoid sweating too much. But they didn’t have that luxury now.

“Come on,” said John. “We’ve got to keep going.”

“Yeah, but where?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no more trail.”

John looked where Cynthia was pointing. She was right. There were no broken branches. No heavy footprints. The terrain was changing. The ground was firmer from this point forward, and the branches weren’t as thick.

“Shit, what do we do now? They could have gone in almost any direction.”

“I don’t know.”

It was hard not to feel discouraged. It was the mission they shouldn’t have been on in the first place, and now it had led to a dead end. Except that it wasn’t just a dead end. It was the start to a journey that might have no end. They might set off in one direction, and simply never find Derek and Sara. They might walk in exactly the opposite direction.

“This would be a hell of a lot easier with cell phones,” said John.

Cynthia laughed. She seemed surprised at her laughter, and maybe a little embarrassed, as if she shouldn’t have laughed, considering the direness of the circumstances.

She looked up at John.

“It’s fine,” said John, starting to laugh himself. “We’re screwed. And if it weren’t tragic, it’d be funny.”

“It’s a fine line, I guess.”

“So where do we go?”

Cynthia shrugged.

Suddenly, off in the distance, came an ear-piercing scream.

John and Cynthia looked at each other.

John’s grip tightened on his gun.

Cynthia took hers from her holster.

“Come on.”

They’d tied something to Miller’s finger. Some kind of simple tourniquet. It seemed to have stopped the blood.

The pain was there. Weird pain. Strong and powerful, but not acute. It pulsed, coming and going in intensity.

Miller sat between the two biggest guys in the backseat of his own SUV.

They were hurtling down the road, driving fast across a mixture of paved and dirt roads. They were heading back the way that Miller had driven just hours ago.

Miller’d had no options. He’d had to tell them something. They’d wanted the location of the radio, and they would have killed him.

In many ways, Miller longed for death. It would all be over. This nightmare. If he was dead, he wouldn’t be haunted by the loss of his family. Or so he hoped. He’d never been a spiritual man, and he didn’t know what waited him on the other side. He’d never put much thought into it before. But now he found his thoughts drifting in that direction.

But it was better to stay alive.

He wasn’t going to give up yet.

Miller was angry with himself. The anger went with the pain that radiated from his finger. He was angry that he hadn’t taken the time to calm down enough to form a reasonable plan. Instead, he’d just dashed away from the farmhouse, driving at top speed. He’d thought that his plan had made sense. Enough sense, at least.

But the plan had shattered when it ran up against the reality of these hardened killers. They weren’t going to fall for something so silly, so juvenile. It had sounded too easy to Miller, the whole plan, and that should have been a warning sign to himself.

Miller hadn’t known where to tell them the radio was. Of course, there was no radio. So what he’d needed was a place where he had some chance of killing these guys, or at least escaping himself, as unharmed as possible.

He’d debated about whether to tell them to go to the farmhouse. On one hand, if those people were still there, Max’s brother, whatever his name was, then it gave Miller a chance of surviving. But it also would put them all at risk.

In the end, Miller was so bent on revenge he told them how to get to the farmhouse.

He figured the people there would be able to take care of themselves. They had plenty of guns, after all.

But Miller was racked with guilt. Maybe he’d end up being responsible for the death of other innocents, not just his own family.

“Is this the place?”

Miller looked out the window. It was the driveway to the farmhouse all right.

“Yeah,” said Miller.

The pain in his hand was bad.

“Keep driving. This is the place.”

The atmosphere in the car was tense. The guys seemed more nervous than Miller. And that was strange, since Miller seemed to have more at stake.

These guys had no idea that Miller was trying to lead them into a trap. And they didn’t seem concerned about the possibility. What they seemed more concerned about was getting or not getting the radio that their boss so desperately desired.

By the way they talked, it sounded as if their boss was just as vicious with his own men and women as his enemies.

“He’ll reward us, though,” said one. “If we get it.”

“I hope. It could be good. But it could be bad, too. Really bad.”

“How so?”

“What if it’s the wrong radio? What if it doesn’t work?”

“You mean we’re going to disappoint him?”

“Yeah, and trust me when I say you don’t want to see the boss disappointed.”

“Oh, I know. I’ve already seen.”

“Come on, you didn’t see shit. You just joined us a week ago.”

“I saw him cut the throat out of some woman.”

“One of us?”

“Yeah. She’d fallen asleep instead of doing her assigned patrol.”

“Well, she deserved it then.”

“I mean, yeah, she deserved it. But having her throat cut out?”

“What do you mean cut out? You mean he slit her throat, right?”

“No, that would have been better. He just stabbed her, then dug around… literally digging out whatever the hell is in there. She was alive for most of it.”

“Sounds like something Kenny would get up to.”

“I hear that,” said Kenny, chuckling.

“So you scared or what?” A bit of a mocking tone.

“Not scared. Let’s just hope we get the right damn radio.”

“Is this the place?”

Someone jammed the butt of a gun into Miller’s ribs, stirring him.

Miller looked up. They’d driven down the driveway and now they sat in front of the farmhouse. It was battered and weather-beaten. But there it was.

The sunlight was dropping fast on the horizon, hidden behind the trees.

No lights shone in the house. Not a good sign.

Had Miller made another mistake? Maybe they’d already left.

“Come on, asshole.”

Someone grabbed Miller by the collar and dragged him forcibly out of his own SUV.

“You think he’s leading us into a trap?” said Kenny.

“Probably.”

“What do we do then?”

“What do we do? Is this amateur hour? We send him in first, that’s what.”

“How’s that going to help us? If he’s got friends in there, it’ll just help him.”

“Whatever. Who do you think I am? Some kind of genius or something? We just send him in. End of discussion.”

The rest of them muttered vaguely mutinous things under their breath, but Miller wasn’t paying attention.

Miller wasn’t going to balk at the leader’s bad strategic thought. Even if everyone had already left the farmhouse, and Miller was all alone, going in first might just give him the chance he needed.

“Come on, get going.”

Another jab from the butt of a gun.

“Don’t want us to cut off another finger, do you?”