Authors: Bret Lott
All four of us with our hands cuffed behind us, duct tape around our heads.
And Coburn most likely with a gun, Prendergast too, and this would be the end, right here, for all of us.
Mom would be the only one left for any video to be made. Mom, alone.
Or maybe I could just pitch myself overboard, try to stay on my back with my hands behind me, swim to whatever side of the creek was closest, and make it away.
Through pluff mud, with my hands still behind me, unable to get a good breath, my ribs kicked in, my eye broken, to some unknown place or person. All if they didn’t shoot me first.
But would they shoot? Would they risk that, a pistol shot in the dark on the creek, right here between the Weapons Station and Landgrave?
And even then, even if I got to that pluff mud by swimming on my back with my hands behind me and with duct tape across my mouth, even then Tabitha and Unc and Five would still be onboard. And Mom still held by Jessup at Judge Dupont’s.
But what if when they heard me jump in, they all jumped in, Unc and Tabitha and Five getting to their knees and standing and pitching into the water on the creek to get away? What if we all right then—
The engine cut off now altogether, silence around me but for the thin whisper of water just moving along the hull, and then I felt a
nudge against the hull where my back was pressed against it, the smallest touch on land but a touch enough to push us away from it, and then came an answering nudge against the other side of the hull: more land, the boat nosing into the head of a finger creek.
And then we hit ground for certain. A pitiful bit of momentum that jostled me same as last night, when I’d dropped that cinder block.
But nobody’d hear anything this night. There was only the touch of a hull against pluff mud. There was only this quiet around us, not even the odd and cold whir of cicadas I’d heard after I’d seen the body, a strange sound that had come to me in the same moment I felt the surprise shock of my own pulse through me.
After I’d seen a woman named Ellen. A member of the cell, killed for honor, but mutilated first. For honor.
“I see Jessup,” Prendergast whispered then, and the words broke whatever spell it seemed lay over us for this quiet, this no-sound of a world about to end for all of us. His voice sounded like he was looking away, maybe somewhere ahead of us, but then, right here, he whispered, “Fifty-seven minutes before al-Qahtani’s on his way. You get these fucks off this boat and I wipe it down and I’m gone.” He paused. “You and Jessup do what you’re going to do with them. But you be ready for my signal it’s a go. Because I’m not making it twice.”
Coburn said nothing, and I heard movement, felt Prendergast hop again, the boat rock a little for it. I heard a push of some kind, another low and heavy grunt from the stern: Unc.
I saw him on the dock out back of our house, him in a folding chair he’d pulled from the marine storage locker and sitting in light from a sun a couple fists still above the trees, a ghost of smoke off his cigar. Beyond him lay the marsh on the other side of the creek, the grasses all mid-spring colors, the brown of winter hustled out by the sharp green of new growth, a hard push of colors one against the other out there.
And in this silence I saw Mom, too, saw her beside me in our old tan Corolla, us driving away from the closing on the chunk of land at
Hungry Neck and on our way to Landgrave for the very first time. I saw her black leather purse in her lap, the black suit and purple silk blouse she’d worn. I saw her smiling, her eyes straight ahead, and saw she was still pretty, her eyes still that same sharp green, her red hair still in its soft curls, a spray of freckles across the top of her nose what somebody’d think was cute.
“Stand up, you blind fuck,” Prendergast whispered hard, and I felt the boat give a quick totter, heard again movement, Unc’s grunts, then two stiff thuds, and Unc groaning.
“Stand,” Coburn said.
There was movement again, slow this time, and then I felt the croker sack whipped from off me, the rush of cool air behind it, and saw above me a shadow, what looked like Prendergast.
A thin wash of stars behind him.
“The easier you make this the quicker we’ll be done,” he whispered, and reached down to me, took hold one arm and pulled me to standing, but the pain in my eye and in my gut staggered me, swayed me to one side and another, no matter I tried to focus, tried to focus.
And still I figured if I pushed against him in some way I could topple him, his ankle like it was. I could butt him and push him and push him, and turn as I pushed him to where he’d be at the gunwale, and his ankle would give, and I could get him over the edge and into the creek and pluff mud, and Unc could butt Coburn somehow, and Five would see, and Tabitha could—
But as I stood there all I could do was snatch at a breath through my nose, tear at a breath, and try to stand firm.
I was nothing.
I swung my head toward the bow of the boat, blinked once, twice.
Five stood there, hunched over not two feet from me, only a shadow, and weeping.
And here beside him was Tabitha, just forward of him. She too was a shadow, but I could make out the sweep of her hair back into a ponytail.
Tabitha. Here.
I’d driven all the way to Palo Alto for her, met her one late afternoon out front of her Spanish fortress of an apartment complex, leaf shadows moving at our feet. She’d had on an old pair of jeans, a gray sweatshirt, her hair back in a white headband, and had never been more beautiful.
Go home go home go home go home go home
, she’d shouted at me with her hands, each point of her fingers two shots into my chest, each touch to mouth and cheek a fist to my face.
But then she’d softened, looked at me with her perfect brown eyes, and slowly, carefully signed,
You have a purpose. Get through the past. Then be Huger
.
And just beyond her, just off the bow of this boat, just out there and far enough away so that it seemed a dream I might have had, some place I’d known only in sleep—I tried at another hard breath through my nose, and another—stood a white stucco house twenty yards in, beside it a waist-high brick fence almost down to this creek.
No light on in an upstairs room this time.
“You first,” Prendergast whispered, and I felt him push me from behind toward the bow, and knew the jab beneath my shoulder blade was a gun. A pistol barrel, same as Jessup’d held to my neck.
The push made me bump hard into Five, who nearly fell, and then here I was beside Tabitha, and I looked at her, looked at her, tried to see her eyes what might be this one last time.
But there was nothing. Only the shadow of her face.
“Go,” Prendergast said again, and I turned, looked toward the house. But past it, too, to the Cuthberts’ place fifty yards farther back and to the right through the trees, where last night I’d seen their coach lamp on, that dime-sized halo it cast on the brick wall it was mounted to.
Maybe they were up. Maybe they’d see a boat sneaking into the Dupont place, and call it in.
But even that light was gone. Nothing. Only black.
Prendergast shoved me, a spike twisted in my ribs, and I lurched past Tabitha, then turned and sat on the bow.
I was facing away now, and saw them all, a jumble of shadowed ghosts, waiting for some purpose, waiting for the next move.
Here was Tabitha just to my right, behind her Five. Here was Prendergast to the left, past them all and beside the console Unc, and Coburn.
Behind them all the whole of the marsh, the uneven spread of blacks and grays and silvers out here. Across it all, a good half mile away, the low jagged tree line: a long line of men on horseback, watching, waiting.
“Now, Huger,” Prendergast whispered, “you’re going to walk on up to the house, and you won’t make a single move otherwise. I’ve got a gun, and Coburn here has one too. And what you’re going to see soon as you get close enough is Jessup standing up there and waiting on you. And you’re going to see he’s got his very own gun too. One he’s holding on your momma.” He paused, and I heard him cock the pistol in his hand, a thick metal chunk of sound. “Believe me,” he whispered, “you make one move to bolt and I’ll pop the girl here, Coburn will do dear Leland, and Jessup’ll have his own fun with Eugenie.” He paused, gave a little laugh, said, “We’ll bat cleanup with baby Warchester the Fifth here,” and Five whimpered loud.
But I was already turned to the house, because Mom was there. She was there, just like I’d thought she’d be, and I knew she was scared, and so I closed my eye, eased down off the bow a little sideways, my arms still behind me and sore for it, the wrists, I felt now, raw for the cuffs, my shoulders a solid band of ache. I slipped down from the bow, ready for the sink into pluff mud, the same mud that’d turned my arms into stumps only last night. The same mud that’d served the purpose to hide a body, until Unc had touched it with a pole.
But it was hard ground I hit, the bow of this boat far enough in, the tide not yet at dead low. I was on ground.
I opened my eye.
The world hadn’t changed. I hadn’t been delivered, nor none of us. No one’d saved us, no answer to prayer here. But I was standing on hard ground.
I took in a breath, stepped out and away from the boat, toward the house, and toward my mom.
And saw the path.
The same one we always used when we came in here to golf. Even to call it a path was to give it more credit than it was due: just the simple parting of cordgrass to left and to right, only a break a few inches wide. But clear to me, even in this dark.
A path. The way we always walked in, and the way we always left.
I stepped onto it, and looked ahead of me, saw the white stucco house, gray in the dark, and saw up there, those twenty yards away, a set of French doors, where Nina had stood and screamed at the knowledge suddenly in her of what Coburn had done: the honor he’d bestowed upon Ellen.
And now I was through the cordgrass, out on the grass. I heard from behind me Prendergast whisper loud, “Move, Warchester!” and then what I knew was Five’s crying, a shredded squeal that sounded full of air somehow, and now I could make out, standing there to the right of the doors, two people.
My mom, there in a white top that’d nearly blended in with the side of the house. Beside her a shadow: Jessup. He stood a couple feet from her, had an arm out perpendicular from him, his hand, I could see, to her neck.
Five still cried behind me, and I heard steps through the cordgrass, quiet snaps of it as he walked through them, and now I heard too a heavy thump, and another: Unc and Coburn, or Tabitha and Prendergast.
But it didn’t matter, because now, now, the dark of this world was fading around me, and all I could see ahead of me was the end of the path I’d walked, the one I’d been on my whole life long.
I saw the purpose, the why of my being here, right now. Here.
This was the end of my life, I knew. This was the end.
Inside the house was a video camera. Inside, too, had to be a woman named Nina, another named Tammy, the both of them afraid, I knew, for their lives, and I saw again Nina scream last night, and saw Tammy tackled by Coburn, her shoulders heaving for the way she sobbed.
I moved closer, saw clearly now Mom, her arms behind her, duct tape around her head as well, and I saw Jessup beside her, saw the gun in his hand, while the rest of the world around me disintegrated into ash, into wind and nothing and night, and now I ran at him, because none of it mattered, and all I knew to do was to try to arrive at the end of this path, the one that was only mine and that would end only with my stopping the man in front of me from harming my mother, whom I loved and would love and had all my life.
The man was Jessup. He had been a friend. But he was a terrorist.
He was death.
This is enough, I thought. This is enough, and all I will bear. I will give up my life, I will give it up.
And I ran the last few feet at him, across the patio, staggered and lurched and tried to breathe inside this pain beyond pain in me, and still ran at him, because I knew this was the end.
“Shoot him,” came Prendergast’s voice from far far away, and I heard a strangled cry from back there too, and knew it was Unc, my father, and that he was crying out to me, and for me.
“Not yet,” Jessup said, his voice cold, sure, and I saw his arm with the gun in it swing from my mother’s neck to me, heard now Coburn’s voice behind me say, “Then I will,” the words no whisper at all, and closer than Prendergast: It’d been him and Unc to climb off the boat after Five.
And Jessup fired, two times in a row.
I saw the flash off the muzzle two feet in front of me, twin explosions of light, and I fell forward, pitched toward him, and hit the side of the wrought-iron table, crashed to the ground.
But I was here.
I felt pain, but the same pain I’d known the whole ride here: there in my ribs, and in my eye.
Here now was Mom, the duct tape pulled down from her mouth. Mom, pushing at me, touching my shoulders, my chin, my forehead. “Huger!” she cried, her face crumpled up.
And standing there behind her, still with his arm out and holding his gun back toward the boat, was Jessup.
Then here were lights down on us, a blast of them from all around us, a flood of them from what seemed inside the trees and beside the house. Lights, and lights, as though midday’d burst down upon us, as though I were suddenly inside a different dream than the one I’d been in only a moment before, the one in which I’d been shot through and still felt only the pain of a fist to the eye, boots to my stomach.
Mom’s face was lit up now, and she squinted for it, and I saw her glance up and away from me, toward where Jessup was pointed.
“That’s it, Commander,” Jessup said loud, and stepped away from us.
Mom peeled down the tape at my mouth, and I breathed in as far as I could, breathed in relief beyond relief, though my ribs wouldn’t allow much in at all.
And now I heard sounds: movement in the trees and bushes around us, just beyond the light smashing down on us, and I rolled over, sat up with all the strength I had left in me, and saw.