Page 141 of Wild Sanctuary

Dave is already on the ground on my left, rolling clear of the tires, and the breath I didn’t know I was holding comes back into my chest at the sight of him moving.

Stan does not move.

He plants his feet in the middle of the yard with the gun up and both hands on it, and for one long heartbeat his eyes find mine through the windshield with all the calm of a man who knows exactly what he’s about to do.

He fires, hitting the front left tire, and the steering wheel tears out of my grip as the truck lurches hard to one side. Then the yard begins to spin.

My shoulder hits the door, then the ceiling, then the door again, and somewhere in the chaos, I’m aware of the grille passing Stan on the wrong side, six feet wide of him.

The F-250 fishtails off to the side, plowing a long-gouged arc through the dirt, as the truck comes to rest broadside against the old pasture fence.

There’s dust everywhere, and I can’t hear a thing over the sound of the ringing in my ears. My left shoulder is screaming blue murder, and through the cracked windshield, I can see Stan, standing exactly where he was when I accelerated out of the equipment barn.

He hasn’t moved a step, the gun is still held up in both hands, and now, as though in slow motion, he turns back toward Dave on the ground.

From the porch, Marcus’s voice is muffled as my ears start to clear, but I can make out what he says.

“Both of them, son. No loose ends.”

Stan does not answer. Instead, he takes two steps toward Dave.

And through the cracked glass of the windshield, across twenty feet of dirt and the cab of a truck I have just destroyed, Dave raises his head to look at me.

Just me.

And his mouth shapes a single soundless word.

Run.

Then Stan pulls the trigger.

The sound of it travels through the broken windshield, into the cab and cuts into my chest like a knife.

Dave drops to the dirt as the scream that tears out of my throat is raw and wordless and too late.

He’s not moving. Fear and grief tighten like a vise around my heart, but I don’t have a moment to process any of it, because Stan has turned his attention in my direction.

My fingers find the door handle on the passenger side, and my ribs and shoulder are in agony when I shove it open. Ignoring them, I drop into the dirt with the F-250 between me and Stan, and my bare feet hit the ground running.

The closest cover is the hay barn, forty feet of open dirt off the far side of the truck, with Stan coming around the tailgate of the F-250 behind me.

I run harder than I ever have before. My body has gone beyond feeling, and my feet only know to do the next thing they’re told.

And behind me, boots pound the ground hard, but I don’t dare look back.

I clear the threshold but don’t slow.

The barn hits me all at once. It’s dim after the high noon sun, and smells of cut hay and old wood. There are stalls running down the left wall, and a stack of bales against the right, with the loft ladder bolted to the post at the back.

I go for the ladder.

Up.

Up is the one direction he is slower than I am. Up is where I am small and he is not.

My hand hits the first rung, and my feet find the rest of them without my eyes having to check. I’ve been up this ladder hundreds of times in my life, and my body remembers.

I’m high up in the dimly lit loft before Stan is through the barn doors.