Authors: Shawn Hopkins
Headlights came bouncing through the trees before swinging around and settling before him, and he thought he could make out more than one vehicle.
The car didn’t come out onto the bridge but stopped just short of it. With the lights blinding him, Scott lowered himself down. He didn’t want them to shoot out his knees. He’d need them to make it over the side of the bridge. Taking the shotgun off his shoulder, he laid it down next to him. Doors opened, and he watched silhouettes step out in front of the light.
“Hello again, Joshua.”
The voice matched the face from Isaiah’s.
Good
.
“Do you have the ring?” His voice echoed through the canyon below.
“I can’t see you,” Scott yelled back.
The headlights flicked off.
“There. Now you can see me.” He smiled. “Do you have the ring?”
“Do you have my wife?” He was going to have to get closer to this guy to use either of the guns.
“Of course.”
“Show her to me!”
The guy made another gesture, and two huge men in black suits opened the back door of the car, reached in and pulled someone out. There was a bag over the face.
“Now, again, do you have the ring?”
Scott noticed some other guys in camouflage standing behind the car by the second vehicle. He looked back to the person wearing the bag. He could definitely tell by the figure that it was a woman. Probably an agent with a knife up her sleeve or a small pistol at her back, or maybe it was just some girl they picked up off the street on their way here. “I told you I wouldn’t have it on me. How stupid do you think I am?”
“Where is it then?”
Scott grinned. “You have some woman with a bag over her face standing fifty yards away from me, and you think I’m going to tell you?”
“How do I know you even have it?” he asked.
“Can you take the chance?”
“Can you?” he shouted back.
“I have nothing to lose.”
“You have your wife to lose, Joshua.”
“Well, you’re going to have to prove that to me. Send her out here.”
The guy stood there for a moment, thinking about it. And then he nodded, saying something to one of the suits. The huge guy pushed the girl in the back and started walking her toward him.
This is as good as it’s going to get
, Scott thought. He’d shoot the huge guy in the head, grab the girl and use her as a shield. Though the guy would make for a better shield, he probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. The girl was more like one-twenty. He could move with her. He waited until the man and the woman were positioned between him and all the guns before standing to his feet. They stopped ten yards away. “Come closer,” Scott ordered. His whole body was tense. He didn’t notice the pain in his back anymore, his arm silent too. He was shaking with anticipation, with adrenaline and anger. Maybe even with fear.
This is it.
They stepped closer, within five yards. Three. Ten feet. Five.
They were standing right in front of him.
He’d wait until the guy pulled the bag off, until it was in his hands. While he was a little distracted.
He was a huge specimen of a man, bigger than he was. But bullets generally didn’t discriminate. Not at close blank range. The man had a .45 SIG P220 hanging loosely at his side.
“Take it off,” Scott told the guy.
He reached up and pulled the bag off the woman’s head.
And Scott’s whole world imploded.
It
was
Jennifer.
41
F
or five seconds, time ceased to unwind, or at least in the same manner it usually did, for these five seconds somehow slowed enough to embrace five
hours
worth of thought and emotion. The first second was pure shock accompanied by a mental debate as to whether or not it was even real. The next second pronounced a verdict on the reality of her presence, while the third opened the floodgates of relief, wonder, elation, and excitement. Even with a blindfold on, she was beautiful, more beautiful than he remembered. The fourth second brought the realization that Mayhew had lied to him, that for his own sadistic pleasure, even in death, he wanted to see Scott in pain. And second five told him just how much everything had changed, things suddenly much, much more complex. He would no longer be using her as a shield in order to make his way over the side of the bridge. Now he needed a plan that would get them both out of there alive. Without the ring. And fast.
Halfway through the next second, she spoke, her hesitant voice full of uncertainty. “Josh?” A tear slipped from beneath the blindfold and rolled down her cheek. “Is that you?” Two more tears.
He stepped toward her and pulled the blindfold off, watched her green eyes adjust to the closeness of his face. He could see thousands of questions and feelings running through them as her bottom lip began to quiver under the weight of so much uncertainty. He wrapped his arms around her as tears rolled down his own face. He could feel her sobbing, squeezing him. He wanted nothing other than to close his eyes and lose himself in the moment, but there was still the issue of the ring that he didn’t have and the guns that were pointed at them. He looked down at her as she lifted her head off his chest. “Did they hurt you?” he asked.
She shook her head, no.
The large guy in the suit carrying the SIG stepped back a few paces.
The guy in charge, the one Scott wasn’t as eager to kill now, yelled to him, “There, you have your wife, just as I promised. Now where’s the ring?”
Even as the NSA man’s lips formed the word, Scott’s eyes dropped down in search of answers to another question he’d harbored for years. Relief flooded his chest when he saw that the rings he’d given Jennifer so long ago were still there right where he’d left them, nestled together right below her knuckle, fourth finger in on her left hand. His heart leapt, and another tear slipped.
“Joshua!” the guy called again. “The ring!”
He looked up to him. “How do I know you won’t grab us once I tell you?”
“If I wanted to, I’d have already grabbed you, started cutting her up right in front of you until you told me everything I wanted to know.” He paused. “If I wanted to.”
It was a very good point. He never thought the conversation would get this far, never thought out an actual location to give them.
Wherever he supposedly put it would have to be somewhere behind him, since it was possible the cell phone traced his route for them. But that was the very direction he’d have to flee in. “You understand my hesitation to trust you,” he said.
“All I want is the ring.”
“Why?”
“Because I was told to get it.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I’m beginning to think you’re stalling, Josh. And why would you be doing that?”
He sighed. “Give us a head start.”
After a glance at his watch, thrusting his hands in his pockets and looking back and forth impatiently, he nodded. “Fine. You’ve got half an hour.”
Scott took a couple of steps backwards, pulling Jennifer along with him. “I’ll tell you from the other side of the bridge.” Then he turned with her and covered the fifty yards to the west end, leaving the shotgun lying on the tracks. He turned back around to face him, thinking fast.
“Well?” called the man, his voice echoing back and forth for a few seconds.
“Follow the tracks for a mile or so west. You’ll see a marker. Go north. You can’t miss it.” His sentence rebounded overtop of itself and continued on down the canyon.
“Kind of vague, isn’t it?”
“You can’t miss it.”
“Fine. But I want you to know that if it’s not there… well, let’s just say we’ve taken precautions. You won’t get far. And when we catch you, we’ll probably be pretty angry at having been lied to.”
He looked down to Jennifer.
“I think they put something in me,” she whispered.
Scott nudged her west and away from the bridge. “Go.”
“Oh, and Joshua,” the voice boomed after them, “does Jennifer know about Los Angeles? About your role in that false flag operation? Perhaps you can tell her about it on your way.”
He pushed her along. “Keep going. Don’t look back.” They began jogging over the tracks.
“Does she know how many innocent lives were extinguished by your hands?”
The question went back and forth across the ravine, rebounding off its sides and repeating itself over and over again, a knife thrusting into his heart with each echo. His dark secret was now laid bare to the wilderness of Northwest Pennsylvania… and to his wife. But all he could do to escape the accusation was move faster.
“What kind of shape are you in?” Scott asked.
She looked over at him, through so much confusion. “What do you mean?”
“How long do you think you can run for?”
“As long as you need me to.”
“Two miles?”
“I’d run a thousand for you,” she replied.
He smiled, resisting the urge to pick her up in his arms and kiss her. “We need to move fast. As fast as we can.”
“What’s going on?”
“There’s no time to explain. But when they find out I don’t have what they want, they’re going to come after us, so we need to get as far away from here as possible.”
After seven minutes, they stopped to catch their breath. Scott needed to think of something that would buy them a little more time. Even if the guy kept his word and didn’t come after them for another twenty-three minutes, it’d only take them two or three minutes to reach their location. That was four minutes lost, meaning they really only had a twenty-six minute head start.
Jennifer dropped her head down between her legs, trying to fill her lungs with the air they were screaming for. The cold air burned going in.
“I need to make a marker,” Scott mumbled. He started walking off the tracks, toward the woods.
“Wait,” she gasped. She stopped him by grabbing his arm, spun him so that he was facing her, and then threw her arms up around his neck. She put her lips on his, kissing him with a passion that no words could describe, years worth of feeling and emotion communicated through their embrace. They held on to each other tight, fearing that if they were to let go they might lose each other forever... again.
A million things were sprinting through Scott’s head, questions he wanted to ask her, things he wanted to say, but the clock wasn’t going to wait for them. Pulling away, he dragged her back toward the woods. “Come on!”
“Josh.”
He turned to look at her, and the sight of her, the way she was standing there staring at him… she looked like an angel, the wind carrying her strawberry blonde hair across her face and over one eye. He could have exploded right there, the emotion he felt surging within almost too much for him to handle. He felt as if his whole existence was no match for the love swelling in his heart. “What?”
“I love you.”
More water filled his eyes. “I love you.”
“I never stopped.”
“Me neither.”
And then she stepped off the tracks after him.
“We need to make a marker.”
And they made a small pile of rocks with a long tree branch sticking out of it. Another two minutes had passed.
“It needs something more obvious,” Scott said.
“You can use my jacket,” Jennifer offered.
He shook his head. “No, I supposedly did this last night.” He quickly unzipped his own jacket, pulled the hooded sweatshirt up over his head, and then took off the white t-shirt. The cold blasted his bare skin and spread goose bumps over his flesh. He noticed Jennifer staring at him, and he smiled. “What’re you looking at?” He tied the shirt around the top of the branch, making a white flag out of it.
She blushed. “My long lost husband.”
God, please get us out of this.
Grabbing his sweatshirt and jacket, he put them back on as he led her up into the woods and away from the train tracks.
“Where are we going?” she asked, panting.
“To see some people about whatever they put in you.”
“What about the ring they want?”
“Hopefully they waste a lot of time searching the area around the flag before they decide to come make me show them where it is.” He helped her up a steep slope, figuring they should start heading west. He wanted to reach the commune before the Mossad abandoned it to the coming soldiers, hoping that Malachi’s men could take out what was put in Jennifer.
Jennifer was growing tired, running out of energy. Her steps were slowing, her breathing more strained.
“Come on, Jen. You can do it,” Scott urged.
It was growing lighter out, though the clouds still hadn’t broken. They navigated through the trees, fully aware that their time together could already be running out.
“How much farther?” Jennifer asked, trying her best to keep up.
“I don’t know. A few more miles maybe.”
She groaned with despair. “I won’t make it.” She tripped and fell.
Scott went back, helped her to her feet.
“I can’t breathe.”
“Come on, we have to make it.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and helped her along.
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she started to cry. “I’m going to lose you again.”
He shook his head. “No you’re not. I’m not going anywhere. You hear me?”
“But I can’t make it.”
She was right. By now the NSA guy would already be on the tracks looking for their marker, and soon they’d be right behind them, tracking whatever was in her. Scott didn’t know how many of them there were, but he was pretty sure the guys he’d seen in camouflage were Special Forces. He wouldn’t stand a chance against them, not with one pistol. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and tried dialing the number Malachi had given him.
Disconnected from network.
He swore and threw the phone against a tree.
They pressed on, slower, and Scott knew that they’d need a miracle to get out of this alive. He figured they had about an hour before their reunion came to a bloody end. He offered a silent prayer, not caring if it made sense or if he even knew to whom he was praying. He held the gun in one hand and Jennifer’s hand in the other.
Ten minutes later, the clouds let loose their load, but it was freezing rain instead of snow this time. Within seconds, Jennifer’s hair was soaking wet and matted to her face. She was shivering, arms folded, and teeth chattering.