Blake Crouch: Birds of Prey

Luther realizing the warm sensation he felt was piss running down the inside of his legs.

“He hit mom,” Katie said, crying. “Why’d he hit mom?”

Rufus flung a handful of sand into the man’s face and rushed him as he clawed at his eyes, scooping the man under his massive thighs and slamming him down on his back in the sand.

Luther had never seen his father this consumed with rage, watching as Rufus hit the man six times in the face, his knuckles getting bloody.

Rufus finally rolled off him into the sand, gasping for breath.

The man lay moaning on his back, his face a purple wreck.

Maxine was sitting up now, holding her jaw which looked swollen.

Rufus grabbed her by the arms and hoisted her up onto her feet.

“My teeth,” she moaned, spitting a tooth out into the palm of her hand.

Rufus hawked a lugie of blood and helped Maxine toward the truck.

“Get in!” he yelled at Luther and Katie.

Luther grabbed the side of the truck and stepped up onto the rear tire.

Katie let out a brief scream, Luther on the verge of asking what was wrong when he saw the second man standing on the other side of the truck bed, grinning at him.

He was tall and wide-shouldered. Had eyes so vividly green Luther could see their color in the lowlight. Wore a blue linen shirt with a long number across the lapel pocket. Dark stains down the front of his shirt.

“Been watching you all afternoon,” he said. “That was some sand castle you and your daddy built.” His eyes cut to Rufus and he swung a pump-action shotgun toward him. “You can stop right there. I swear to God. You all right, Ben?”

The man Rufus had hit was trying to sit up.

“Motherfucker hit me.”

“I saw. That was embarrassing.”

“I’m gonna kill him.”

“Plenty a time for that.” The man with the shotgun stared at Luther. I want you over by the fire like you was.”

“Sir, we just want to go home,” Rufus said.

The man smiled. “I’ll bet you do.”

“Let my wife take our kids. They don’t need to be a part of any of this.”

The man laughed. “How am I supposed to fuck her when she ain’t here? That make any sense to you?”

The man named Ben rose to his feet, wiping blood out of his eyes.

“Ben, you hear this guy?”

“I heard him. Dumb fuck, is what he is.”

Luther stepped down off the truck and looked up at his father.

“Dad?” he said. “Is it gonna be okay?”

Rufus’s hands shook.

“No, little man,” Ben said. “It ain’t gonna be okay. Get your ass over there like I told you.”

Luther looked at Katie.

His sister had tears in her eyes.

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Come on, Luther.”

She took him by the hand and led him back over to the fire.

They sat in the sand.

The man named Ben started toward Rufus.

“There’s some rope in the truck bed,” his partner yelled.

“Bring it, Winston.” He stopped a foot away from Rufus and Maxine, and shovel-punched Rufus in the gut.

Luther’s father doubled over.

Maxine clutched his back, trying to soothe him.

Winston walked over with the shotgun and a coil of rope that Rufus had used just three weeks ago to stabilize a bureau he’d bought in an antique store in Hatteras for Maxine’s thirtieth birthday.

Winston stopped several feet away, leveled the shotgun on Rufus and Maxine, and tossed the rope at their feet.

“What’s your name, cutie?” he asked Maxine.

“Please,” Rufus said, still gasping for air, a tremor moving through his lower lip. “You guys can clearly do whatever you want. We’re at your mercy. I recognize that. And I am begging you to let us go. You have that power.”

Winston swept his long, greasy hair back behind his shoulders.

“But we been watching you all day, laying up there in the bushes behind the dunes. If you’d gone home with everyone else, our paths would never have crossed. But you didn’t go home like everyone else. You stayed. So you know what I think that means?”

“What?”

With the tip of the shotgun’s barrel, Winston slid the shawl off Maxine’s shoulder, and smiled at the yellow bikini underneath, at her washboard stomach.

“That this is fate. Now what’s your name, bitch? Don’t make me ask again.”

“Maxine,” she said. “Please don’t hurt my children.”

“Maxine, I want you to take that rope and tie your husband up. I’m gonna check when you’re done, and if it ain’t picture perfect and tight as fuck, there’s gonna be hell to pay. Even more than what’s already on the schedule.”

Luther watched his mother lift the rope.

Crying and trembling, she wrapped it around Rufus’s waist and started to bind his wrists together.

“It’s gonna be okay, Max,” he said. “Don’t cry. We’ll get through this.”

Winston tugged a pocket knife out of his pants and cut a ten-foot length of rope which he tossed to Ben.

“Tie them.”

With his knife, he motioned to Luther and Katie.

Ben lumbered over to the rope and snatched it up. When he smiled at Luther, there was still blood stuck between his teeth.

Luther watching, a sinking jolt of terror flooding through him.

A siren wailing between his eyes.

Knowing on some base level what he could not allow to happen.

The man was three steps away when Luther jumped to his feet and took off toward the trees at a dead sprint, his bare feet kicking bursts of sand in his wake, the men shouting as he scrambled up the dunes, Winston screaming at Ben to catch the little fucker.

Luther glanced back, saw Ben galloping toward him, Katie crying, his parents screaming at him to run, don’t stop, while Winston held them at bay with the shotgun.

Luther tore down the island-side of the dune and ran for the line of trees in the distance.

He could see the lighthouse a mile away in the village of Ocracoke , its beacon shining just above the treetops.

Another glance back.

Ben ten steps behind.

A sharp burn spread down out of Luther’s stomach and into his legs.

Lungs on fire.

He couldn’t keep running like this.

He punched through the treeline into a wood of live oaks, roots and thorns ripping at the soles of his feet, branches tearing at his bare arms and chest.

Much darker here in the trees with the starlight obscured, and Luther could only make out the profile of Ben pushing after him through the shrubs.

The boy veered off the straight trajectory he’d been running and shot up the low-hanging branches of a live oak.

Ten feet off the ground.

Panting.

His feet eviscerated.

For thirty seconds, he couldn’t hear a thing over the pounding of his heart and the desperate intake of oxygen.

When he finally caught his breath, he strained to hear the sound of Ben’s footsteps.

Sweat trickled down the bridge of his nose, burning his eyes.

He clung to a fat, knobby branch with one arm and plucked a series of thorns out of the back of his leg with the other.

There it was—forty, maybe fifty feet away—brittle leaves crunching under footsteps.

Winston yelled something from the beach.

Ben was moving toward Luther’s tree now—he could hear the man forcing his way through bushes, the occasional crack of a branch breaking.

“Boy!” he yelled. “I don’t hear your footsteps anymore. You ain’t that fast, which means you’re somewhere close by, hiding behind some tree, or in some goddamn bush.”

Luther spotted him—twenty-five, thirty feet away—standing absolutely still. A bit of moonlight had wandered in through the branches and it lit Ben’s face with a pale and ghostly glow.

“I’m gonna make you a deal right now, little man. You come out from wherever you’re hiding, I won’t hurt your sister.”