“Are you going to take us back to the police?” I ask. I’m not sure how he would be able to manage to drag us both back into the town. Even in Granite’s current condition, it would be a lot for Clay to be able to carry and pull us both along with him. That leads me to an even more grim conclusion that maybe he is just planning to kill us both.
“No,” he says. “Not yet anyway. I really want to see my brother suffer a little more first.”
“Why?” I cry.
Clay just laughs at me.
“You thought that breaking him out of that jail cell would save him? Not at all, he was much safer inside a life of imprisonment than he is out here in the wild with me. Stupid move on your part.”
Just as I get ready to say something else, Clay stops suddenly and we both see a set of hands reaching up onto the side of the slop near us. Clay pulls me quickly over with him to see Granite as he clings to the land in very visible pain.
“Wonderful!” Clay says as he lets me go and pushes me away with a thrusting motion that sends me falling backward onto the ground. “You’ve made this all so easy for me.”
Clay reaches down and yanks his brother up by the arm in order to pull him completely onto the mountain with us. Granite screams in pain as if he is having his limb pulled off. He is hurt, badly.
I get to my feet and start to run over toward him as Granite lays in a heap on the ground, but before I can reach him, Clay pulls his foot back and then collides it into Granite’s side in a swift and heavy kick against his ribs.
“Stop!” I scream as Granite hollers.
Clay turns to look at me before he gets ready to kick Granite again.
“Stop? Why in the world would I want to stop? This is way too much fun.”
Granite
My brother’s kicks on the side certainly don’t help the brokenness of my body, but at least I made it onto the mountain and Amber is alive. I wish I could say that I was shocked to see Clay here, but I’m not. Nothing can shock me anymore about my brother, not after the first time of seeing him show up on my doorstep after thinking he had been dead. The only thing that I don’t understand about him is why. Why is he so insistent on making my life hell?
Amber looks frightened, and exhausted, and pretty beat up from the cold. I want to get up and hold her, but I can’t. My body just won’t let me move, not after the climb and that generous beating from my brother.
“Whelp,” Clay says. “Since it looks like you’re a bunch of dead weight, I guess we’ll set up camp here. I was hoping to move a little further inward and away from the edge, but this will be fine. Might even make it easier for me to push you both off if it suits me.”
Clay sets his pack down on the ground and starts to pull out the supplies to set up a tent. He knows that we aren’t going anywhere. I can’t move and he knows that Amber won’t leave me. We’re trapped until I am able to either outrun him or fight him, and neither of those things are an option yet. If I could just get a couple of days of food and rest, things would be a different story.
As soon as Clay gets busy setting up camp, Amber runs to my side and cradles me in her arms before she starts to cry. She buries her head down against mine.
“It’s okay,” I say to her quietly. “I’m okay.”
“You don’t look okay,” she cries.
“Well,” I say with a small chuckle to try to lighten the mood, even though it makes my ribcage feel like a bunch of broken glass inside my chest. “You don’t look that okay either.”
“Gee, thanks,” she says as she wipes her tears with the back of her hand.
“We’re both alive and we’re both together,” I say as she helps me to sit up.Damn my body hurts so much, it’s incredible.“That’s all that matters.”
Amber nods her head and I try to wrap one of my arms around her without wincing. She can tell that I’m in pain because she rests her head so gingerly on my shoulder that it barely even feels like she is there.
After Clay has the tent set up and has a small fire made with some food that he had brought cooking and crackling over the flames, I ask Amber to go inside the tent to get some warmth and some rest. She’s going to need it. She doesn’t want to leave my side at first, but I really want the chance to speak to my brother alone, so I coax her into it until she leaves. Once she is inside the zipped tent, I face my brother with the burning question that he has still never really answered.
“Why do you hate me so much?’ I ask him.
He pulls out a flask of whisky and when he offers it to me, I gulp down as much of it as I can before he takes it back. The alcohol helps to numb the pain.
“Haven’t we already hashed this out before?” he says as he takes a giant swig himself. “You ruined my life.”
“Clay,” I plead in an attempt for him to see reason. “I have never done anything against you.”
“You had the life that I wanted,” he says. “You had the woman that I wanted. Hell, even now you have another woman that I wouldn’t mind having.”
