Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

I felt like we could’ve heard a leaf land outside at that point. “It’s her twelve-year-old sister,” Tara continued, looking deathly pale and probably thinking of Emily. “And they have her at the camp.”

I’ve got this thing against pedophiles—and drunk drivers. Okay, so who doesn’t? Pedophiles, I’d like to see them burned at the stake, but that’s never been legal. So they’ve existed among us, and we’ve always had to wonder who they are and how close they are to our kids. Were our kids safe around anyone anymore?

I’ve always been of the opinion that convicted pedophiles, if there was physical evidence to find them guilty beyond any doubt, should have the word “pedophile” tattooed on their foreheads. They should have to wear a mark that screams, “I abused children” everywhere they go. They don’t deserve to hide. If they even deserve to live.

Yeah, that’s how I used to feel.

And drunk drivers—I always felt similarly strong about drunk drivers, long before Sophie was killed by one. If you get a DUI, you should lose your license. Get a second one, they should take you to Malaysia or Singapore—wherever—and cane you. You should never have the option of getting a third, but if you did? Well, then you outright deserve to be shot.

Again, that’s how I used to feel. Strangely, that all changed when Sophie died—at least towards drunk drivers.

When Sophie died, I learned the strongest force in life is guilt. The hardest thing to overcome is shame. You have to look yourself in the mirror every single day and account for everything you’ve done wrong. You can’t take it back.

Sure, some of these people are ill. Some of them might not even be able to control themselves. Pedophiles, alcoholics, they are by their nature terminally sick people. And they’re habitual. It’s never just one child, one mistake, one accident. They keep going back to the bottle. They keep going back for more.

The last one is only the last one until there’s the next one. They deserve a beating… but beatings always end.

Guilt, on the other hand, doesn’t stop. It never stops hitting you.

I’m not God. At some point I not only could acknowledge that but also learned to respect it. Who’s to say what His master plan is? With so many wicked and evil things happening to so many good people, there’s no way we can understand. It’s surely not our place to.

But my intense judgment of others softened when I realized in many ways I was equally as bad as some of these other people—albeit at an entirely different level. As I carried the burden of even the littlest things I’d done wrong with Sophie, I could suddenly think of no better payback for the bastard who had killed her than to have to live with his mistakes for the rest of his life. I no longer wanted him to die. I didn’t want him to find a way out. I wanted him to always know what he’d done and never be able to forgive himself. Perhaps that was even more wicked of me. The truth had to really suck for him.

He got five years for killing my wife. Five years. At the time of the attacks he still had two of those left. He probably died in a cell in the attacks. If that was the case, he got off easy. I’d rather he still be alive. I’d rather he still be waking daily to, and tossing and turning nightly from, the re-creation of his every mistake…that he be hating himself more and more every day. I wanted him to live to death… long, slow, and painfully. That’s what he deserved.

I didn’t want that kind of sentence for the men at this camp. I wanted them to die today, but wanted their pain to be physical. I wanted these men to die slowly, yes, but to bleed out from a million paper cuts. They needed to pay for what they did to this poor girl. And if they had done the same thing to this girl’s twelve-year old sister…well, there would be no forgiveness in my heart for any one of them.

If you think that’s harsh, imagine someone doing it to your child, and you’ll share a tub of popcorn with me while we watch him die. Truth is, you’d want to hurt him…in the worst possible way.

The truth is a little too honest for some people.

We all wanted to do something about how we were feeling. You could sense the tension in the room and couldn’t have begun to cut into it with a chainsaw.

I could only imagine what Tara was going through, sitting beside the girl, reliving her own worst memories, and then looking at Emily and imagining it all happening to her daughter as well. How Tara could sit still beside that girl without exploding was beyond me. But then, I knew there was another side to that coin too.

Tara didn’t want her to feel alone, not even for a second. No one but her parents had been there for Tara. No one had saved Tara. It took her almost twelve years to even look at a man and hope for something good. Yeah, Tara knew how to handle this because she’d lived it. She’d carried a shame with her over something she hadn’t even done wrong, and been burdened by a guilt she never should have had. Tara knew what this girl was going through and how long it would take for these wounds, emotional and physical, to heal. The rest of us had the luxury of not knowing.

We were “fortunately ignorant.”

Hayley finally gave a voice to our rational side. “We can’t do anything about this, guys.”

Danny agreed. The rest of us continued to fume.

“I’m serious,” she continued. “If we go down to that camp now, and let’s say we can even take all of them out, what good would that do us? We don’t have a way out of here. They’ll just send more troops. Way more.” She let that sink in a little. “I know this may be hard to even imagine right now, but what if they haven’t done anything to the little girl?” She was right about one thing. Not one of us found that thought the least bit imaginable.

“Hayley, seriously,” I cut in.

“She’s right,” Tara spoke up behind me, making me jump. “If anyone goes down there now, we’re all dead.” She looked at the floor. “It kills me to say this, but the best payback may just be escaping all this.”

“You can’t really mean—”

“Maybe,” Danny cut me off, also not totally agreeing. “But I can’t leave that little girl there.”

“Okay,” Tara said with an edge to her voice. “So what? How are you going to save her without losing your own life, or costing all of us ours? What if you go down there, and it’s too late? What if any of us does something that ends up hurting the rest of us? If we save one little girl, would it honestly be worth it?”

Emily probably shouldn’t have been listening to this, but she was, and none of us were ready for her question. “What if it was me, Mommy? Would you come get me?”

Her question gave me chills. I swear I even saw Dad shudder. I saw tears start to form in Tara’s eyes as she knelt beside her daughter. “Emily. Of course I would, honey.” She hugged her tightly. “Of course I would.” She was looking right at Danny then.

I looked at Danny too as he nodded. Message delivered and received . Just because she said what we all were thinking didn’t mean that’s how she really felt. But it needed to be said. She didn’t want us to leave that girl down there, either. “Midnight,” Danny said to Blake. “Wake me up at midnight.”

Danny always loved Capture the Flag. The goal of the game was to somehow get into the enemy base and take the other team’s flag without getting caught. Danny, of course, was a natural. He and his friends played it at school when they were young, using flag football belts to determine “life” or “death.” Lose the flags Velcroed to your waist, and you were “dead.”