Kristen Simmons - Breaking Point

In a flash, Chase had drawn his weapon and jerked me behind him.

Nothing happened. No one fired.

I felt every part of me extending like roots down my legs, through my heels, and into the slick linoleum. I couldn’t move. I was frozen. Stuck. It was like a nightmare, when the monster is chasing you down, and you are helpless to defend yourself.

“I know who you are!” Harper yelled over the noise. “Jennings and Miller. We followed your case in basic training. Put down your weapon and come with me.”

He was new on the job; I’d figured that downstairs. If he’d followed our story in training, he must have just been sent to work in the past few weeks.

More blaring siren. More church music. I willed my body to move, to do anything, but it was like I was shoving through wet concrete.

“We’re leaving,” Chase responded. “You can let us leave. You can let us walk through the door. No one has to know.”

Chase lowered the gun a fraction of an inch. Every beat of my heart felt like an explosion in my chest.

No, Chase, I thought. Don’t trust him. But gone was the soldier who’d rescued me from the reformatory, the cold, fragmented soul who knew death too intimately. Back was Chase— my Chase—who believed in change.

The soldier’s hand was visibly shaking. Beads of sweat blossomed on his hairline and dripped down his jaw. I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he attempted to swallow. His fear was all around us, choking us, more potent than my fear, which only demanded survival. His fear weighed options. Weighed the consequences of Chase’s proposal.

If the MM knew he’d let us escape, they would kill him.

“Lower your weapon!” Harper repeated again, his voice breaking.

I thought of Billy, and how his voice broke because he was only fourteen. This soldier was only a few years older. He could be the same age as me. We could have sat next to each other in high school. We could have taken the same tests, and stood in line to punch our meal passes in the cafeteria. We could have been friends in a different life.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Chase said.

“Do it or I’ll shoot you!” he shouted.

A frightened cry snuck out between my lips. The soldier’s weapon jerked toward me, and I saw, straight on down the barrel of his gun, how the whites of his eyes surrounded his brown irises.

My still body grew hard and fragile like glass. If he fired, I would shatter.

“Look at me,” Chase said firmly. “Don’t look at her. Look at me.”

I begged my body to move. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t.

The soldier aimed back at Chase’s chest.

“I’m taking you in,” he said. “I’m giving you five seconds to lower your weapon.”

“They taught me that one, too,” Chase said. “Back in Negotiations. I trained here, too, did you know that?”

“Four seconds,” said the soldier. His hands were still shaking.

The breath shuddered out of my body. My heels moved at last. My fists gripped. The freeze had passed.

“Come with us!” I heard myself say.

His gaze jerked my way, but Chase blocked his path.

“Three.”

“She’s right,” Chase said, the urgency now clear in his voice. “Come with us. We can protect you.”

“Lower it! Two seconds!”

“Please!” I begged.

“You don’t want to shoot me,” Chase said rapidly. “I don’t want to shoot you either. I promise, we can help you. We can protect your family.”

The soldier twitched. Chase lowered his weapon slowly, aiming it at Harper’s knees.

“We can keep your family safe,” continued Chase. “I know what it’s like. They hurt someone I cared about, too. They threatened to hurt her more if I didn’t follow orders, but I got out and you can do the same.”

“You don’t know that!” Harper choked on the words. The tears blurred my vision.

“I got her away from them,” Chase said. He removed one hand from the firearm, and held it up for Harper to see.

The soldier’s gun dropped an inch. Then another. A wave of dizziness came on, and I felt my knees begin to buckle.

“Come with us.” Chase took a tentative step forward.

“I can’t…” the soldier was crying now, that heaving, snot-filled crying that wracked spasms through his body. I couldn’t hear him over the sirens, but I saw it, and that was enough.

“You can,” said Chase. “Let’s go.”

One more step forward.

The soldier’s chin shot up, and he burned Chase with an agonized, distrustful stare.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said.

Everything slowed.

I saw Harper’s gun lift, as if pulling through water. I saw his eyes change, the lights in them go dark. Chase lunged for his arm, hitting him hard in the break at the elbow, and then they were locked together, chest to chest. They hit the ground in a streak of blue. Chase’s gun slid out, bumping against my foot. Before I could bend to retrieve it, the sound of gunfire ripped through my body, and I screamed.

Chase scrambled back.

We sat in stunned silence for a full beat, watching the blood pool on the floor from Harper’s chest. He didn’t cough or choke, he didn’t rasp words like the carrier in Harrisonburg. He died instantly.

And then, in a flood, everything within me burst into motion. My ears rang, my pulse scrambled. Even my muscles burned to run.

Chase felt Harper’s neck for a pulse. He grabbed the dead boy’s uniform and shook him. “No!” he shouted. And then, “Get up, man. Come on. Get up !”

I grabbed Chase around the waist, feeling the quake echo through my body. He was still shaking the dead soldier; both guns were lying to the side.

“Chase!” I grasped his face, turned it toward me. His face was blank with shock.

“Look at me!” I shouted, just as he’d told the soldier moments before. “Look at me, Chase! We need to go! We need to get out of here!”

His breath came in one haggard gasp, and as his eyes readjusted, his hands cupped mine, and he staggered to a stand.

And then he was back. He grabbed my hand, scooped his weapon off the floor, and together we skirted around the body through the exit.

THEchaos in the stairway was thinning, but the way was still blocked by Sisters guiding patients down the steps. They hadn’t heard the gunshot over the alarm. They didn’t know what we’d done.

Chase released my hand so we wouldn’t draw attention. The loss of his touch felt like something breaking off of me. My airway tightened, made it hard to breathe.

Put it away, I told myself. Lock it up. That was the only way to get out of here alive.

Finally we reached the bottom of the stairs. I kept my head down, peering through my fringed curtain of black hair as we entered the foyer, where we’d nearly had ID scans, and then through the buzzing door, into the lobby.

It wasn’t hard to find Tucker. He was alone, and a foot taller than the Sisters. His brows lifted in surprise when he recognized Chase, but he had the good sense to flatten his expression. As he steadily shoved toward us, my gaze darted from side to side in search of an ambush in these last twenty feet before our freedom.

There was a bottleneck effect near the door. We packed in tighter. When Tucker got close enough, I fought the urge to punch him in the face. He’d been the one to tell me Rebecca was here. He’d known she’d been transported to this facility, so he had to have known why, and he hadn’t once mentioned her injuries.

But he’d also gotten us inside.

“Have you seen Sean?” I asked him.

“I saw him carry her outside,” he answered. “She can’t walk?”