Authors: Rain Stickland
“If only you hadn’t killed my son, your dad would still be alive. He was a waste of life anyway. Not like my son. No. He was nothing like my beautiful Gerry, the product of my loins, my namesake, and the true keeper of my heart. His father was never anything more than a means to an end, though his end was maybe meaner,” she said with a little chuckle. Another picture dropped in front of Cam, and since she was still looking in that direction, at the picture of her dad, she saw what had been done to Brian Newman. His entire lower half was soaked in blood.
“What … ” Cam started, but was unable to finish the question.
“What did I do? Oh, I just paid him back for his refusal to have more children with me. Served him right for taking the decision from me by having that vasectomy. But now everyone has paid except you, my dear, and I think your time has come.”
Kelly had done just what she had said with regard to the bail hearing, so the formalities were out of the way with Mike now. The second escape attempt, aided and abetted by Mitch, had prompted Kelly to simply come down to the little cell and inform him that bail was denied. Not that he had anything to offer as surety even if he had been granted bail, but the process had been run through just the same. Mike would be held until Kelly got around to providing him with a trial.
Then there was Mitch. He saw Mac as she was walking across the yard to witness Mike’s informal hearing, and tried to waylay her.
“This is just a misunderstanding, Mac. Seriously. You know me better than this. I’d never do anything to a kid,” he pleaded.
“Fuck off, Mitch. Pack your shit. Chuck will be taking you to your new home, and if you show up here in the future you’ll be run off in a hail of bullets. You got that, or do I need to write it down for you?”
“Cunt,” he snarled at her.
“What was that?” Mac asked icily.
“You heard me,” Mitch said, his tone filled with hatred.
“Ah, so the truth finally comes out. I’m no longer any use to you, so I’m nothing but a cunt. You know what? You just lost your supply privileges. You’ll still get the chickens and the seeds for growing your vegetables, because I’m not going to give you a death sentence just for calling me names, but I sure don’t feel obliged to make life easier for you anymore. You can do things the hard way now. If you don’t survive, it’ll be your own damn fault. But, call me a cunt just one more time, and see how far my patience stretches.
“You have to be the dumbest motherfucker I have ever encountered in my life. You were given the chance for a decent life here. If you’d been smart you would have had to work one day out of every ten. Instead you insulted the one person who had total say over what happened to you. Cam went easy on you, because she knew I cared what happened to you, but even in your precarious position you decided to help out a fucking child-molester. Nice work. So you were exiled, but were still being given everything you could possibly need to survive in a relatively easy fashion. What do you do? You insult the person who’s trying to keep you alive.
“Maybe one day you’ll stop and ask yourself what the fuck is wrong with your brain, because you have completely screwed yourself over. Now, get the fuck out of my way, because I’m done with you. If you force me to continue speaking to you, it won’t be words you’ll be hearing.” If he muttered anything else as she left, she didn’t hear it.
Once Mac had finished with Kelly and Mike, she’d stood and watched Cam for a while. It was a relief they were starting right away, because Mac did not have a good feeling about what was going on with Allan. An hour later, she had watched Mitch being carted off in the truck. Just to be on the safe side, she’d sent both Jim and Gilles with Chuck. They had gone through Mitch’s things to destroy the scrap of paper on which he had written the farm’s location, and had removed the batteries from his GPS after deleting its history.
She hadn’t expected the need to maintain law and order in whatever fashion they saw fit. She had only planned for the possibility that she and Cam would need to defend themselves, and their property, but now they had so many people sharing that property that it had become necessary to formalize a sort of criminal justice. Mac had no idea whether or not she would have done what Cam had managed to do. She might well have fallen into the trap of simply dispensing her own brand of justice, or allowed Chuck to do the same.
It was a lot more work to do what Cam was attempting. If they had prisoners, and they weren’t going to simply execute pond scum like Mike, it meant they had to take responsibility for their prisoners’ welfare. It made her feel sick in a way, but also made her grateful that they weren’t sinking to that level.
Thoughts of her daughter had her mind moving on to Allan, and the sticky situation he’d gotten them into. Cam was right about one thing. If he was involved with Geraldine, he would have to leave. It was too great a risk to allow Allan continued access to the property. He was the kind of person who was easily manipulated, and Geraldine would eventually get whatever she wanted out of him. He might not mean any harm, but he would cause plenty nonetheless. He would have to make a choice, and she would have to give him until at least the next day to make it. They already had three people off the farm to take Mitch to his destination, and couldn’t afford more to remove Allan should he remain stubborn.
Mac went looking for Neil to see if he’d managed to find Allan, but it turned out that Allan hadn’t been seen for a while. No one was sure when he’d been there last. Cameron might know, and it was possible she knew where he was, too, so she went looking for her daughter to find out. When she went into the house she saw Donna sitting on one of the kitchen stools, keeping an eye on the security monitors.
“You haven’t seen Cam, have you?” Mac asked her.
“She left,” Donna said.
“Left? You mean she left the property?”
“Yup. Probably half an hour ago, I’d say. Driving that fancy black car of yours,” she added, making Mac roll her eyes. She’d worn herself out explaining that she had only paid a thousand dollars for that ‘fancy’ car, but no one seemed to believe her. In their eyes it was a BMW, and therefore must have been expensive. She’d bought it because it was fast, reliable, rarely required maintenance, and the motor left about the same carbon footprint as a hybrid. It was just too bad it wasn’t a diesel, because Gilles could have converted it for her then. Now it was going to end up as nothing more than scrap metal at some point.
“Did you see which way she turned when she left?”
“Went to the right, toward Rosseau,” Donna supplied. Mac frowned. She must have gone to see her dad. It was the only thing that made sense. She wasn’t scavenging for supplies, or she would have taken a truck, and since she was apparently aware of her own potential danger, only something she considered important would convince her to leave the property. Even when she’d been dealing with her guilt, and had made one bad decision, she hadn’t left the farm. That was before Mac and Neil had gone away, though. Since then Cam had gone to the hardware store, for reasons Mac didn’t think all that important. Maybe she was getting used to making her own decisions, risky or not.
She hadn’t been gone long enough for there to be any reason to think something was wrong, but Mac wasn’t letting it go. They needed to find her. Fast. Mac was sure she had gone to convince her dad to give up his illicit girlfriend, which in a way was for her own protection, but she had put herself in potential jeopardy by doing so.
Mackenzie grabbed a couple of two-way radios and ran out of the house to find Neil. They would take separate vehicles and search the streets near the hardware store. She ran into Ian while she was looking for her husband, though, and decided to bring him along with her. When she found Neil, he was with Billy, so the four of them got into two of the trucks and headed to the hardware place close to Neil’s former knife store.
They crossed paths in front of the hardware store, Billy and Ian communicating with one another that nobody had seen anything yet. They travelled around what might be considered a block in a larger town, in opposite directions, but couldn’t find anything at first. It was twenty minutes before Neil noticed the BMW parked in a strange driveway, with all the windows down, but Cam was nowhere to be found. At that point they all agreed to search on foot, calling her name. It was risky, since it was entirely possible Geraldine was out there and would mark their locations, but Mac needed to find her daughter.
There was no answer. They combed one yard after another, on the street where the car was parked, breaking into each house to search from top to bottom. Mac just kept moving, frantic, ignoring the bodies they seemed to find in every house. Her heart was pounding, and her mouth arid as the desert. Nobody tried to convince her that Cam would be fine. They all knew the danger she was in if their suspicions about Geraldine were right.
They had searched the entire street. All the yards and houses surrounding the car on both sides of the road had been gone through thoroughly. The only other possibility was that she had purposely parked the car out of sight, which meant they needed to search the other streets. Mac kept moving. There was no question of anyone giving up. Directly across the street from the hardware store, however, Mac’s heart stopped. She could just barely see a foot, toes pointed upward, and a walkway shielded by trees. Her hand reached out and gripped Ian’s t-shirt. He pushed the button on the radio as they moved forward together.
“We’ve found something. House number twelve right across from the hardware store. Left side of the house on a walkway. We’re not sure what yet. Meet us here,” he said, his voice cold and rigid, but no colder than Mac’s heart. She almost couldn’t bear to step forward. She had to know, but couldn’t stand it. If that was Cam lying there, Mackenzie’s world would end. Nothing else would ever matter again.
Ian stalked forward as her body argued with her mind, and he was back in moments.
“It’s not her, Mac,” he said hoarsely. She looked up at him, not understanding.
“Who?” she finally managed.
“I don’t know. Some woman. I think her neck’s been broken. But there’s a lot of blood there, too, and it can’t possibly be hers. There were pictures beside the blood, too, but we can look at those later. Right now I think we need to find your daughter. If she was with that woman, and that’s her blood, she’s been hurt pretty badly. Possibly shot, because there’s a gun lying beside the dead woman.” If anything, Mac’s panic increased. Ian was probably right, and that meant her daughter could bleed to death if they didn’t find her soon.
There was no answer to their calls. Mac looked at the body on the walkway and recognized Geraldine. She was no forensics expert, but the way her head was twisted seemed to confirm what Ian had said about her neck. They decided to check out the house, to see if Cam had gone inside to look for emergency supplies. There were some in the trunk of the car, but maybe she didn’t think she could make it that far. Instead they found Allan.
“Oh my God. It’s Cam’s dad,” Mac explained to Ian. Neil and Billy finally arrived at the house, but Mac rushed out to keep them from going in. Billy didn’t need to see that. They would deal with that later, though. For now Cam was their priority.
They criss-crossed through more yards, and then headed back to the other street to see if she’d gone back to the car. Nothing was there. Not even the car, though there was plenty of blood on the ground.
“Wasn’t that the passenger side?” Ian asked. Mac thought about it.
“I think you’re right. There must be someone with her. I hope to Christ it’s someone friendly who can take her back to the farm. Neil, I’m heading back there. Please stay here and keep looking for her, just in case she’s still here and needs help. Billy, you come with me so you can come back and let your dad know what’s going on if we find her. Ian doesn’t know his way around.”
Mac wasn’t really in any condition to drive, but then neither was anyone else. Empty streets kept them from getting into an accident, though. They went around a bend in the road near the farm, however, and nearly plowed into the back of the BMW. Mac jumped out of the truck while it was still rolling past the car, yelling at Billy to stop the truck.
She leaned into the driver’s side window of the car to find a stranger trying to shake her daughter awake.
“I’m her mother. Let me drive,” she shouted in his ear. He jumped out of the car to let her in, and she peeled away, leaving him standing on the dirt road. For the first time since she’d installed the biometric fingerprint scanner beside the gate, she cursed its existence. As she pressed her thumb to the pad, she saw Billy pulling up in the truck with the stranger in the passenger seat.
Mac ran back to the car, shoved it into gear, and spun thick clouds of dirt into the air before the tires grabbed hold and propelled the car through the open gate. She slammed on the brakes in front of the ferret building, but not in time to avoid hitting it with the car. The loud scraping crunch had every head in the yard turning in their direction. Annette and Kelly both came running out of the building to see what was going on.
“
Help me with her
,” Mac screamed, unlatching Cam’s seatbelt, and half a dozen people came running. She threw open her own door so hard it bounced back against her knee, but she didn’t notice as she launched herself out of the car and around to Cam’s door. It took a few seconds of clawing at the handle to realize the door had been locked, so she reached in through the window to pull on the inside handle. There was blood everywhere, covering Cam from shoulder to knee, and she knew there was no time to waste looking for the injury. She would have to leave that to Annette, and let her start repairing the damage right away.
Kelly had run back in to grab a blanket, so they laid Cam out on it and all six people grabbed part of it to take her inside the small shed Annette used for performing exams and whatnot on the animals. She kept it sterile, so it was by far the safest place to take Cam. Mac had built the exam table for her. It was made out of wood, but performed its function well.
“We’re both O-positive,” she told Annette, who nodded at her.