The Escape (9 page)

He focused his sight on the driver, who was moving the truck at a pretty steady pace, heading right toward them.

“What if they don’t mean to kill us?” Clarissa asked.

“They didn’t come looking for us just to say hi,” Jenna said, and raised her rifle. “And I will kill to protect us. I will.”

Barker exhaled the way the Colonel had taught him to do, right before he pulled the trigger. The noise was deafening. And he’d missed.

“Fucking hell. Fuck fuck fuck,” he said as two men from the back of the truck sprayed gunfire their way.

But they couldn’t see him the way he could see them, and the car between them offered protection. Barker fired again, and this time, he hit the driver. The truck swerved madly as the man slumped forward in the driver’s seat, and the front passenger grabbed the wheel.

A bullet whizzed by his head, so close he could feel the air pressure around his head change as it went by.

Barker took aim, but it was harder this time, with the truck swerving. He shot and missed.

Then a blast came from Jenna’s rifle, and the second soldier was down.

“Got one,” she gasped.

The truck hit a stalled car and two other soldiers jumped out of the vehicle, not bothering to even put it in park, and ran toward them.

Barker switched the tab on his rifle from semi to full auto, even though he knew it would waste bullets. He pulled the trigger and held it, a spray of noise and bullets flying from the gun toward the men, but as far as he could tell, neither were hit.

Fuck. He wasn’t used to shooting on full auto. The recoil was a bitch and he had no control. He switched it back to semi, took aim, and brought another soldier down. It was a chest shot, though, and he wasn’t sure if the guy was dead or just wounded.

Barker looked over at Jenna, but she wasn’t there. She’d left her position when he was busy firing. Where the hell was she?

A burst of rapid gunfire came from behind another car. Now he didn’t dare fire back, in case it was Jenna and not the enemy.

“Die, motherfucker!” she screamed, and there was silence.

No more gunshots sounded on the deserted road.

“Jenna, are you hit?” he yelled.

Please, God, let her be okay.

He ran forward, hoping it wasn’t a trap, hoping he wasn’t running right into a soldier’s gun.

But no. The soldiers, four of them, were dead. Two in the truck, two bodies on the road.

“Jenna?”

She looked up at him, rising from behind her hiding spot against a car tire. “I’m okay. You?”

“I’m okay.” He ran his hands through his hair and his fingers came back bloody. “What the fuck?”

“Oh my God.” Jenna ran toward him and touched his head. “You were shot in the head!”

“No, I’m fine,” he said, but his scalp was bleeding. “Get Clarissa, make sure she’s okay.”

“I’m fine,” Clarissa called, and she ran toward them. “I really need my own gun, okay? I need a gun. I’ll never point it at you, Barker, okay?”

Barker tried to nod but he was feeling dizzy.

“Shit, Barker, are you hit?”

“Just a scratch. I must have hit my head.”

Jenna looked at his wound carefully. “I’m not a doctor, but I think that the bullet grazed you. You’re missing some skin but . . .” She winced as she probed his wound, and he stifled a groan. “But it’s not deep.” she said.

“I didn’t even feel it,” Barker said. “I mean, I thought that bullet missed me completely.”

“A couple of centimeters’ difference and you’d be dead.” Jenna wiped her bloody hands on her pants. “Do you have a first aid kit in your pack?”

“Check their truck,” he said, sitting on the pavement, leaning against a tire. “Take everything. The guns, the ammo, the packs. We need it all.”

Jenna and Clarissa went to the truck, and Barker watched as Clarissa gingerly picked up one of the dead soldier’s guns and strapped it across her chest.

“How did we just kill four trained soldiers?” Jenna asked in amazement.

“We had the element of surprise. We saw them first, we were hidden, and we made the first strike,” Barker said. “That’s how.”

Clarissa grabbed a roll of gauze out of one of the supply packs. “There’s nothing to clean the wound with,” she said. “Just water.”

“Go for it,” he said, and laid back, his cheek resting against the pavement.

The water burned worse than the initial shot did, as she poured it over his head, letting the blood sluice out onto the street. She stuck a bunch of gauze squares against it and wrapped his head with the roll.

“How do you know how to do this?” he asked.

“I learned it on television,” Clarissa laughed. “Before the Pulse. Everyone on TV needs someone to put pressure on a wound at some point, right?”

He laughed, which hurt his head, so he stopped. “Thanks.”

“We can take their truck,” Jenna said.

Barker sat up slowly. “If we take the truck, what will we do when we get to the marina? Leave it there? What if they find it? They’ll know where we are.”

“We should hide it,” Clarissa said. “Put the bodies in the truck and drive it off the road somewhere, so if they find it, it will throw them off our trail.”

Jenna nodded. “Barker, you lie there and rest.” She handed him a canteen of water. “Hydrate.”

Then, she leaned down and kissed his lips. “You scared the fuck out of me.”

He smiled.

He may have just had to kill men for the first time in his life. He may have been wounded by a bullet meant for his skull, but Jenna had kissed him, and somehow the day didn’t seem so terrible after all.

“Grab its legs,”
Jenna told Clarissa. She’d rather refer to the man she’d just killed as “it,” not a person. Not his legs. It was just a body.

They would have killed us.
Why send out four men otherwise? To take care of them once and for all. Colonel Lanche didn’t care about questioning her. And as soon as Barker stole another gun and more supplies and escaped, Lanche had to know that Jenna was actually still alive.

Working together, they put the two dead men

(bodies. Just bodies.)

in the back of the pickup truck, and moved the driver and the body in the front seat into the back too.

“I can drive the truck by myself, and walk back, if you want. You can stay with Barker,” Jenna offered. But the thought of being in that truck, piled high with bodies, gave her the heebie-jeebies.

“Unless you think he needs me to stay, I’ll come with you. So you have someone to walk back with.” Clarissa gave her a quick, strong hug. “You did really awesome back there. I don’t know if I would have had it in me.”

“If you had a gun, you would have done it. When someone’s shooting at you, instinct kinda takes over, you know?” She gestured at the dead man’s gun strapped to Clarissa’s chest. “And now you have one. Just keep your finger off the trigger and the switch on Safe until you need it, okay?”

“Got it.” Clarissa flipped the little lever from Semi to Safe and grinned. “Yikes.”

The seats were covered in blood—the scent of copper and death filled the truck.

“I don’t want to get in,” Jenna whispered.

“So forget it, let’s just leave it. Let’s just go. They won’t go searching for the men for at least another day, and we’ll be on Barker’s boat by then.”

Jenna shook her head. “We have to at least face it in a different direction, or hide it a bit.” She pointed to the cemetery off the side of the expressway. “Wait here. I’m going to drive it off the road into the cemetery.”

Clarissa stepped back and Jenna got into the truck. She hadn’t driven in years. Even before the Pulse, she didn’t have a car. Didn’t need one in Manhattan. Last time she’d driven was in a rental car when she’d gone to her friend’s wedding in Atlanta.

Her friend in Atlanta, and her husband . . . were they dead too?

The car was still running. She had no idea how to work a stick shift, but she turned the wheel and pressed the gas, and the truck rolled off the side of the road, bumping hard as she ran over something. Fuck.

She kept it moving, trying to turn the wheel as much as possible, to make the truck look like they were heading in the other direction. But the gravestones got in the way, so she stopped.

She turned the key in the ignition and shut the truck off, and put it in park, trying not to touch the blood that seemed to cover almost every surface of the interior. Impossible.

I need a bath. Fresh clothes. How can I keep walking when I’m covered in blood?

Killing those men—what if, after everything she’d done, this was the thing that sent her to hell when she died?

Please God, please know I had to do it.

Fuck. She looked around the abandoned graveyard, the grass overgrown, moss covering the tombstones. God was probably way too busy to listen to her. Especially since there were so many people in the country right now probably saying the same exact prayer.

It only took her a couple of minutes to reach Clarissa on the side of the road.

“Let’s go. We need to get to that boat.”

But when they got back to where they’d left Barker lying on the pavement, he was gone. Only a spot of blood remained.

“Barker!”
Jenna called.

Where the hell had he gone? Had he left them?

“I’m here,” a voice yelled down the road.

Jenna and Clarissa ran to him.

“You can’t just leave like that,” Jenna said. “I thought—”

He wrapped his muscular arms around her, getting the blood from her clothes on him, and not seeming to either notice or mind. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “We’re safe now.”

“How’s your head?”

“I bet it looks worse than it is. I’m fine.” He kissed her gently and she stood on her tiptoes, wanting to give him more access to her lips, wanting to lose herself in him.

But Clarissa was standing right behind them.

“Sorry,” Jenna said, and Clarissa waved her hand, as if to say it was no big deal.

“I can carry that,” he said, and took one of the bags Clarissa had gotten from the dead soldiers. “At least we have more supplies now. And guns.”

“And ammo,” Jenna added. “We used up a bunch of it.”

“That we did.”

The silence was crushing, the realization of exactly what that meant filling the very air around them.

They walked single file again, faster than before despite the new supplies weighing them down. It was as if they all had an unspoken understanding.

Get as far away from that battle scene as possible.

They arrived at
Locust Point Marina several hours later.

Barker hadn’t known what to expect, but a nearly empty marina wasn’t one of them. The place was eerily quiet—even the seagulls that usually perched around the docks were missing.

“Where are all the boats?” Clarissa asked.

Where, indeed. Holy fuck.

“People must have taken them. My father’s boat used to dock right out there,” he said, pointing to an empty dock. “Someone hijacked it. Motherfucker.”

Jenna inhaled sharply.

He sat down, needing to rest, needing to think. “I can’t believe it’s gone.”

“There are other boats here,” Jenna said. “We’ll take one of them.”

“We can’t steal a boat,” Barker said. “I used to know some of these people.”

She burst into laughter. “Seriously? We can steal food, supplies, guns, we can kill people, fucking
kill people
, but we can’t take a boat when we have no other options?”

“It just doesn’t seem right,” Barker said.

“Well, you enjoy sitting here, waiting for the soldiers to come looking for the men we just murdered, and Clarissa and I will be on some other dead guy’s boat.”

It was a bluff. Had to be. Neither Jenna nor Clarissa knew how to operate a boat. But they were walking up and down the docks, looking for the best option.

“Fine,” he said finally, standing. “We’ll take that one.” He pointed to a medium-sized boat with a cabin. “It’s just like my father’s. I’ll know how to sail it.”

They walked onto the dock, but Jenna kept staring at the water.

“I want to jump in. Can I jump in, clean off?”

“Let’s get on the boat first, and put on life preservers,” Clarissa suggested. “No point in drowning now.”

But when they got nearer to the boat, Barker shouted, “This is my father’s boat.”

“No way.”

He pointed to the name on the side of the hull. The
Marjorie
. “It was named after my father’s mother. Someone moved it. Don’t know why, but someone moved my boat.”

Clarissa stepped aboard, setting her pack down on the wooden deck. “It’s really nice.”

Barker grinned, ready to board his boat, when he heard Clarissa gasp, and suddenly she seemed to fall—no, she was
pulled
down into the cabin.

“Don’t take another step,” a gruff voice said from below.

Clarissa’s eyes were wide with fright, and a tan male arm was around her neck, the rest of his body hidden inside the boat’s interior compartment.

“Get out of here, now. This is my boat,” the voice said. They couldn’t see his face.

“Let her go,” Barker said, raising his rifle. But there was no way to get a clear shot, not with Clarissa being used as a human shield.

“Sir?” Jenna called. “Please don’t hurt Clarissa. I’m Jenna, this is Barker. And this is—was—Barker’s family boat. We won’t hurt you.”

“Don’t lie to me! Barker’s dead. Now drop your weapons.”

Jenna looked at him, but he shook his head. The man had just threatened them. Without their guns, they were all as good as dead.

The man squeezed Clarissa’s neck and she cried out, a strangled sound.

“It’s my boat now,” the man said. “If you drop your weapons, we can continue this discussion without anyone dying today.”

Jenna laid her rifle down, but Barker kept his up, ready to fire when he got a clear shot.

“Please,” she said, “we just walked in on this guy. Put the gun down.”

“Walked in on him? He stole my boat!” He kept his rifle aimed on the man. “Let her go.”

“No problem. Drop the guns, I let her go. We talk, man to man.” Despite the man’s hardened voice, he sounded almost . . . sane. But sane people could be dangerous too.

The man kept Clarissa in front of him, but he pushed her back up the stairs out of the cabin and onto the port side of the boat. His face was covered in facial hair, his hair long and messy. But he didn’t have that too-thin look Barker was so used to seeing. In fact . . . something about him looked . . . familiar?

“Put down the gun, soldier, and I’ll let go of Clarissa here,” the man said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, not if I don’t have to.” The man seemed cautious, as if the wild look Barker knew was still in his eyes from the earlier battle had him rattled.

“Who are you?” Barker asked.

“Name’s Roy,” he said tightly. “What do you know about Barker?”

“That’s me. Let her go, now. This is my boat.”

“Robert Barker was my friend, asshole,” the man hissed. “And he’s dead. This isn’t your boat any more than it’s mine.”

Oh shit. Barker lowered his rifle slightly. “Robert Barker’s dead? For sure? Do you know that, for sure?”

He blinked rapidly to keep himself from tearing up. It had been a fucked-up day. Yeah, he’d assumed his parents were dead, like so many others, but to hear it from someone—he hadn’t expected it to hit him like that.

Barker took a shaky breath and exhale. “He’s my . . . he was my dad. I’m Ken Barker.”

“Ken?” Roy risked peering out more from behind Clarissa. “Good lord in heaven. Do you remember me? Roy Nolan? Last time I saw you, you were a teenager. Didn’t recognize you with the uniform and the bandaged head. . . . What happened?”

Roy dropped his arm from around Clarissa’s neck, and she scrambled up the steps, tumbling onto the boat’s deck in her effort to get away.

Jenna pulled Clarissa toward her and wrapped a protective arm around her shoulders. Clarissa touched her neck, running her hands over that necklace she wore, as if to make sure it was still there. The man’s arm had been so tight on her throat that the necklace chain had left an imprint on her pale skin.

“Are my parents dead?” Barker asked, touching the gauze on his head wound. He did remember a Roy Nolan, but barely. What he remembered mainly was that Roy owned a boat and liked to talk with his dad about his renovations, that sort of thing. Stuff a kid wasn’t interested in.

Right now, the only thing that mattered was whether or not this man knew what happened to his parents.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said. “We were at a FEMA camp together set up at the church. There were too many people, it was chaos. There was some sort of virus that spread like wildfire. No clean water, contaminated food—what little there was of it. Lot of people died. That’s when I left. Figured I’d be safer on my own than in a crowd.”

“What are you doing on our boat?” Barker asked. “Where’s yours? The . . .”

Barker couldn’t remember the name of Roy Nolan’s boat, but he did know it was named after his late wife. His dad had told him Roy had never sailed a day in his life until his wife told him she wanted to be cremated, to have her ashes scattered in the water. It was the kind of story that stuck with a kid.

“The
Holly
,” Roy whispered. “I’m just glad my wife passed away before the Pulse—that she never had to see everything we’ve had to see. As for why I’m here, well . . . figured you were dead, like everyone else. It . . . I didn’t think anyone would be coming for it. And my boat . . . it’s gone. Was gone when I got here.”

“Well, we’re here now,” Barker said softly. “I need my boat.”

“What brought you back to the marina now, after all this time?” Roy asked.

“We’re looking for a quick way to get up the coast,” Jenna said. She whispered to Barker, “How well do you know this guy? Do you trust him?”

“My dad liked him. I barely knew him,” Barker said.

But Roy was surviving, and surviving well, without any help from the army or FEMA or men like Colonel Lanche. And that wasn’t something Barker wanted to mess up, for anyone.

Fuck. Fuck.

It wouldn’t feel right to kick Roy off the boat, but he didn’t know where that left them. Roy had said he was safer on his own, not in a group.

“Hey,” Roy said. “Maybe you could use some help. You guys are the first people I’ve spoken to in . . . God, in over six months? Wouldn’t mind going to a town—something that’s got space, fresh air.” He looked at Barker’s bloodied uniform and frowned. “Someplace with no soldiers, if there is such a thing anymore. No offense.”

“None taken.” Barker looked at him. “So, what now? You’re saying . . . we can stay on the boat? All of us?” He knew the interior cabin was large enough, with enough berths for up to six people.

“I meant, maybe I could leave with you. This boat . . . I never actually got the boat under way.”

“What does he mean?” Clarissa asked Barker.

This wasn’t good. Not good at all.

“Look up,” Roy said. “The main sail and jib are missing. And if you feel like getting wet, you’ll see the centerboard and rudder are destroyed. The fuel that was in the tank is gone, too. Someone messed this boat up, but it wasn’t me. I just used it for the shelter, and the easy access to the water. For the fresh air. The only people that survived were the ones like me, who avoided the crowded rooms, avoided the viruses that spread—”

But Barker was still stuck on the first thing Roy had said, about the sails. He looked up in horror—Roy was right. The sails were gone. And without a functioning rudder and centerboard underneath the hull, there was no way the boat was going anywhere.

This can’t be happening.
He saw their dream of sailing away to freedom disappear like a morning fog.

“So who moved the boat?” Clarissa asked.

Roy shrugged. “Like I said, it was here when I found it three months ago. Don’t know what happened before that. It was cleaned out, like all the others.”

“Where are all the other boats?” Barker asked.

The man shook his head. “Don’t know, Ken. Barker. What do I call you?”

“Just Barker. Like my dad.”

“All the boats left here are as useless as this one. Where are you headed, anyway? Do you know of a specific place to go, someplace safe?”

“We’re just going up the coast to see if there are any fishing communities or anything. Maybe up by Connecticut. We don’t know any more than you do, I don’t think,” Clarissa said. “Unless you’ve been up that way?”

“Wait,” Jenna said, putting her hand on Clarissa’s arm. “How do we know he didn’t sabotage the boats himself? Barker said he barely knew him. People have done stranger things after the Pulse.”

“I suppose you don’t know me,” Roy said. “But I’d rather have a working means of transportation than a wrecked one, so it doesn’t really make sense that I’d single-handedly mess up all the boats in the marina.”

“So you want to . . . join us?” Jenna asked. She looked at Barker, but he shook his head emphatically.

“Wait. That’s a decision that needs to be made carefully. There’s one thing the Colonel taught me that I’ll never forget,” Barker said. “It’s called OpSec. Operational security. And bringing along a guy just because he used to talk to my dad on the weekends—a man I haven’t even seen in over a decade, someone who just used Clarissa as a hostage—puts us—our security—at risk.”

“I apologize for that, Barker. I thought you were going to shoot me.”

Barker sighed. The man seemed normal. But could they trust him?

“I don’t like this idea,” Clarissa whispered. “He had his arm around my throat. He’s proven he could be dangerous.”

“I’m not dangerous,” Roy said. “I can help you guys. I have my own supplies, I know how to shoot, and you have extra guns—”

“We’re not giving you a gun,” Barker said. “Like I said. You knew my dad, but that doesn’t make us instant best buds, all right? Slow down.”

Roy shook his head. “We got off on the wrong foot. I made a bad first impression, I get that. And here I am, squatting on your father’s boat like a hobo or something. And . . . what happened with the girl.” He nodded toward Clarissa. “I’m sorry. Truly.”

“Barker,” Jenna whispered. “Can we talk?”

She pulled him off the boat, onto the dock. Clarissa looked at them, as if unsure whether to join them or to stay and guard their guns. She stayed, watching the man warily.