Her eyes locked with his. The silence that followed the threat was deafening. Sam couldn’t look away. Fear ran like razor blades through her heart. She had never in her life met someone so utterly, soullessly evil.
Charlie began to whimper.
“Zach,” Hightop said. “Come on, man.” He waited. They all waited. “We had a deal, all right?”
Zach didn’t move. None of them moved.
“We had a deal,” Hightop repeated.
“Sure,” Zach broke the silence. He let Hightop take the shotgun from his hands. “A man’s only as good as his word.”
He started to turn away, but then changed his mind. His hand shot out like a whip. He grabbed Sam’s face, fingers gripping her skull like a ball, slamming her back so hard that the chair fell away and her head clanged into the front of the sink.
“You think I’m a pervert now?” His palm crushed her nose. His fingers gouged into her eyes like hot needles. “You got something else to say about me?”
Samantha opened her mouth, but she had no breath to form a scream. Pain ripped through her face as his fingernails cut into her eyelids. She grabbed his thick wrist, blindly kicked out at him, tried to scratch him, to punch him, to stop the pain. Blood wept down her cheeks. Zach’s fingers shook, pressing so hard that Sam could feel her eyeballs flex back into her brain. His fingers curled as he tried to rip off her eyelids. She felt his nails scrape against her bare eyeballs.
“Stop it!” Charlie screamed. “Stop!”
The pressure stopped just as suddenly as it had started.
“Sammy!” Charlie’s breath was hot, panicked. Her hands went to Sam’s face. “Sam? Look at me. Can you see? Look at me, please!”
Carefully, Sam tried to open her eyelids. They were torn, almost shredded. She felt like she was looking through a piece of old lace.
Zach said, “What the fuck is this?”
The hammer. It had fallen out of her shorts.
Zach picked it up off the floor. He examined the wooden handle, then gave Charlie a meaningful look. “Wonder what I can do with this?”
“Enough!” Hightop grabbed the hammer and threw it down the hallway. They all listened to the metal head skip across the hardwood floor.
Zach said, “Just having a little fun, brother.”
“Both of you stand up,” Hightop said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Charlie stayed on the floor. Sam blinked away blood. She could barely see to move. The overhead light was like hot oil in her eyes.
“Help her up,” Hightop told Zach. “You promised, man. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”
Zach yanked Sam’s arm so hard that it almost left the socket. She struggled to her feet, steadying herself against the table. Zach pushed her toward the door. She bumped into a chair. Charlie reached for her hand.
Hightop opened the door. “Go.”
They had no choice but to move. Charlie went first, shuffling sideways to help Sam down the stairs. Outside the bright lights of the kitchen, her eyes stopped throbbing as hard. There was no adjusting to the darkness. Shadows kept falling in and out of her gaze.
They should have been at track practice right now. They had begged Gamma to let them skip for the first times in their lives and now their mother was dead and they were being led out of the house at gunpoint by the man who had come here to erase his legal bills with a shotgun.
“Can you see?” Charlie asked. “Sam, can you see?”
“Yes,” Sam lied, because her vision was strobing like a disco ball, except instead of flashes of light, she was seeing flashes of gray and black.
“This way,” Hightop said, leading them not toward the old pickup truck in the driveway, but into the field behind the farmhouse. Cabbage. Sorghum. Watermelons. That’s what the bachelor farmer had grown. They had found his seed ledger in an otherwise empty upstairs closet. His three hundred acres had been leased to the farm next door, a thousand-acre spread that had been planted at the start of spring.
Sam could feel the freshly planted soil under her bare feet. She leaned into Charlie, who held tight to her hand. With her other hand, Sam reached out blindly, unreasonably afraid that she would run into something in the open field. Every step away from the farmhouse, away from the light, added one more layer of darkness to her vision. Charlie was a blob of gray. Hightop was tall and skinny, like a charcoal pencil. Zach Culpepper was a menacing black square of hate.
“Where are we going?” Charlie asked.
Sam felt the shotgun press into her back.
Zach said, “Keep walking.”
“I don’t understand,” Charlie said. “Why are you doing this?”
Her voice was directed toward Hightop. Like Sam, she understood that the younger man was the weaker one, but that he was also somehow in charge.
Charlie asked, “What did we do to you, mister? We’re just kids. We don’t deserve this.”
“Shut up,” Zach warned. “Both of you shut the fuck up.”
Sam squeezed Charlie’s hand even tighter. She was almost completely blind now. She was going to be blind forever, except forever wasn’t that much longer. At least not for Sam. She made her hand loosen around Charlie’s. She quietly willed her sister to take in their surroundings, to stay alert for the chance to run.
Gamma had shown them a topographical map of the area two days ago, the day they had moved in. She was trying to sell them on country life, pointing out all the areas they could explore. Now, Sam mentally flipped through the highlights, searching for an escape route. The neighbor’s acreage went past the horizon, a clear open plane that would likely lead to a bullet in Charlie’s back if she ran in that direction. Trees bordered the far right side of the property, a dense forest that Gamma warned was probably filled with ticks. There was a creek on the other side of the forest that fed into a tunnel that snaked underneath a weather tower and led to a paved but rarely used road. An abandoned barn half a mile north. Another farm two miles east. A swampy fishing hole. Frogs would be there. Butterflies would be over here. If they were patient, they might see deer in this field. Stay away from the road. Leaves three, quickly flee. Leaves five, stay and thrive.
Please flee, Sam silently begged Charlie. Please don’t look back to make sure I’m following you.
Zach said, “What’s that?”
They all turned around.
“It’s a car,” Charlie said, but Sam could only make out the sparkling headlights slowly traveling down the long driveway to the farmhouse.
The sheriff’s man? Someone driving their father home?
“Shit, they’re gonna make my truck in two seconds.” Zach pushed them toward the forest, using the shotgun like a cattle prod to make them walk faster. “Y’all keep moving or I’ll shoot you right here.”
Right here.
Charlie stiffened at the words. Her teeth started to chatter again. She had finally made the connection. She understood that they were walking to their deaths.
Sam said, “There’s another way out of this.”
She was talking to Hightop, but Zach was the one who snorted.
Sam said, “I’ll do whatever you want.” She heard Gamma’s voice speaking the words alongside her. “Anything.”
“Shit,” Zach said. “You don’t think I’m gonna take what I want anyways, you stupid bitch?”
Sam tried again. “We won’t tell them it was you. We’ll say you had your masks on the entire time and—”
“With my truck in the driveway and your mama dead in the house?” Zach huffed a snort. “Y’all Quinns think you’re so fucking smart, can talk your way outta anything.”
“Listen to me,” Sam begged. “You’ve got to leave town anyway. There’s no reason to kill us, too.” She turned her head toward Hightop. “Please, just think about it. All you have to do is tie us up. Leave us somewhere they won’t find us. You’re going to have to leave town either way. You don’t want more blood on your hands.”
Sam waited for a response. They all waited.
Hightop cleared his throat before finally saying, “I’m sorry.”
Zach’s laughter had an edge of triumph.
Sam couldn’t give up. “Let my sister go.” She had to stop speaking for a moment so she could swallow the saliva in her mouth. “She’s thirteen. Just a kid.”
“Don’t look like no kid to me,” Zach said. “Got them nice high titties.”
“Shut up,” Hightop warned. “I mean it.”
Zach made a sucking noise with his teeth.
“She won’t tell anyone,” Sam had to keep trying. “She’ll say it was strangers. Won’t you, Charlie?”
“Black fella?” Zach asked. “Like the one your daddy got off for murder?”
Charlie spat out, “You mean like he got you off for showing your wiener to a bunch of little girls?”
“Charlie,” Sam begged. “Please, be quiet.”
“Let her speak,” Zach said. “I like it when they got a little fight in ’em.”
Charlie went quiet. She stayed silent as they headed into the woods.
Sam followed closely, racking her brain for an appeal that would persuade the gunmen that they didn’t have to do this. But Zach Culpepper was right. His truck back at the house changed everything.
“No,” Charlie whispered to herself. She did this all of the time, vocalizing an argument she was having in her head.
Please run, Sam silently begged. It’s okay to go without me.
“Move.” Zach shoved the shotgun into her back until Sam walked faster.
Pine needles dug into her feet. They were going deeper into the forest. The air got cooler. Sam closed her eyes, because it was pointless trying to see. She let Charlie guide her through the woods. Leaves rustled. They stepped over fallen trees, walked into a narrow stream that was probably run-off from the farm to the creek.
Run, run, run, Sam silently prayed to Charlie in her head. Please run.
“Sam …” Charlie stopped walking. Her arm gripped Sam around the waist. “There’s a shovel. A shovel.”
Sam didn’t understand. She touched her fingers to her eyelids. Dried blood had caked them shut. She pushed gently, coaxing open her eyes.
Soft moonlight cast a blue glow on the clearing in front of them. There was more than a shovel. A mound of freshly turned earth was piled beside an open hole in the ground.
One hole.
One grave.
Her vision tunneled on the gaping, black void as everything came into focus. This wasn’t a burglary, or an attempt to intimidate away a bunch of legal bills. Everyone knew that the house burning down had put the Quinns in dire financial straits. The fight with the insurance company. The eviction from the motel. The thrift store purchases. Zachariah Culpepper had obviously assumed that Rusty was going to replenish his bank account by forcing non-paying clients to settle their bills. He wasn’t that far off. Gamma had screamed at Rusty the other night about how the twenty thousand dollars Culpepper owed them would go a long way toward making the family solvent again.
Which meant that all of this boiled down to money.
And worse, stupidity, because the outstanding bills would not have died with her father.
Sam felt the reverberations of her earlier rage. She bit her tongue so hard that blood seeped into her mouth. There was a reason Zachariah Culpepper was a lifelong con. As with all of his crimes, the plan was a bad one, poorly executed. Every single blunder had led them to this place. They had dug a grave for Rusty, but since Rusty was late because he was always late, and since today was the one day they had been allowed to skip track practice, now it was meant for Charlie and Sam.
“All right, big boy. Time for you to do your part.” Zach rested the butt of the shotgun on his hip. He pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and slapped it open with one hand. “The guns’ll be too loud. Take this. Right across the throat like you’d do with a pig.”
Hightop did not take the knife.
Zach said, “Come on, like we agreed. You do her. I’ll take care of the little one.”
Hightop still did not move. “She’s right. We don’t have to do this. The plan wasn’t ever to hurt the women. They weren’t even supposed to be here.”
“Say what now?”
Sam grabbed Charlie’s hand. They were distracted. She could run.
Hightop said, “What’s done is done. We don’t have to make it worse by killing more people. Innocent people.”
“Jesus Christ.” Zach closed the knife and shoved it back into his pocket. “We went over this in the kitchen, man. Ain’t like we gotta choice.”
“We can turn ourselves in.”
Zach gripped the shotgun. “Bull. Shit.”
“I’ll turn myself in. I’ll take the blame for everything.”
Sam pushed against Charlie, letting her know it was time to move. Charlie didn’t move. She held tight.
“The hell you will.” Zach thumped Hightop in the chest. “You think I’m gonna go down on a murder charge ’cause you grew a fucking conscience?”
Sam let go of her sister’s hand. She whispered, “Charlie, run.”
“I won’t tell,” Hightop said. “I’ll say it was me.”
“In my got-damn truck?”
Charlie tried to take Sam’s hand again. Sam pulled away, whispering, “Go.”
“Motherfucker.” Zach raised the shotgun, pointing it at Hightop’s chest. “This is what’s gonna happen, son. You’re gonna take my knife and you’re gonna slice open that bitch’s throat, or I will blow a hole in your chest the size of Texas.” He stamped his foot. “Right now.”
Hightop slung up the revolver, pointing it at Zach’s head. “We’re gonna turn ourselves in.”
“Get that fucking gun outta my face, you pansy-ass piece of shit.”
Sam nudged Charlie. She had to move. She had to get out of here. There would only be one chance. She practically begged her sister, “Go.”
Hightop said, “I’ll kill you before I kill them.”
“You ain’t got the balls to pull that trigger.”
“I’ll do it.”
Charlie still wouldn’t budge. Her teeth were chattering again.
“Run,” Sam pleaded. “You have to run.”
“Rich boy piece of shit.” Zach spat on the ground. He went to wipe his mouth, but only as a distraction. He reached out for the revolver. Hightop had anticipated the move. He backhanded the shotgun. Zach was thrown off balance. He couldn’t keep his footing. He fell back, arms flailing.
“Run!” Sam shoved her sister away. “Charlie, go!”
Charlie turned into a blur of motion. Sam started to follow, leg raised, arm bent—
Another explosion.
A flash of light from the revolver.
A sudden vibration in the air.
Sam’s head jerked so violently that her neck cracked. Her body followed in a wild twist. She spun like a top, falling into darkness the same way Alice fell into the rabbit hole.
Do you know how pretty you are?
Sam’s feet hit the ground. She felt her knees absorb the shock.
She looked down.
Her toes were spread flat against a water-soaked hardwood floor.
She looked up to find her reflection staring back from a mirror.
Inexplicably, Sam was at the farmhouse standing at the bathroom sink.
Gamma stood behind her, strong arms wrapped around Sam’s waist. Her mother looked younger, softer, in the mirror. Her eyebrow was arched up as if she’d heard something dubious. This was the woman who’d explained the difference between fission and fusion to a stranger at the grocery store. Who’d devised complicated scavenger hunts that took up all of their Easters.
What were the clues now?
“Tell me,” Sam asked her mother’s reflection. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
Gamma’s mouth opened, but she did not speak. Her face began to age. Sam felt a longing for the mother she would never see grow old. Fine lines spread out from Gamma’s mouth. Crow’s feet around her eyes. The wrinkles deepened. Streaks of gray salted her dark hair. Her jawline grew fuller.
Her skin began to peel away.
White teeth showed through an open hole in her cheek. Her hair turned into greasy white twine. Her eyes grew desiccated. She wasn’t aging.
She was decomposing.
Sam struggled to get away. The smell of death enveloped her: wet earth, fresh maggots burrowing underneath her skin. Gamma’s hands clamped around her face. She made Sam turn around. Fingers reduced to dry bone. Black teeth honed into razor blades as Gamma opened her mouth and screamed, “I told you to get out!”
Sam gasped awake.
Her eyes slit open onto an impenetrable blackness.
Dirt filled her mouth. Wet soil. Pine needles. Her hands were in front of her face. Hot breath bounced against her palms. There was a sound—
Shsh. Shsh. Shsh.
A broom sweeping.
An ax swinging.
A shovel dropping dirt into a grave.
Sam’s grave.
She was being buried alive. The weight of the soil on top of her was like a metal plate.
“I’m sorry.” Hightop’s voice caught around the words. “Please, God, please forgive me.”
The dirt kept coming, the weight turning into a vise that threatened to press the breath right out of her.
Did you know that Giles Corey was the only defendant in the Salem witch trials who was pressed to death?
Tears filled Sam’s eyes, slid down her face. A scream got trapped inside her throat. She couldn’t panic. She couldn’t start yelling or flailing because they would not help her. They would shoot her again. Begging for her life would only speed up the taking of her life.
“Don’t be silly,” Gamma said. “I thought you were past that teenager stage.”
Sam inhaled a shaky breath.
She startled as she realized that air was entering her lungs.
She could breathe!
Her hands were cupped to her face, creating an air pocket inside the dirt. Sam tightened the seal between her palms. She forced her breaths to slow in order to preserve what precious air she had left.
Charlie had told her to do this. Years ago. Sam could picture her sister in her Brownie uniform. Arms and legs like tiny sticks. Her creased yellow shirt and brown vest with all the patches she had earned. She had read aloud from her Adventure handbook at the breakfast table.
“‘If you find yourself caught in an avalanche, do not cry out or open your mouth,’” Charlie had read. “‘Put your hands in front of your face and try to create an airspace as you are coming to a stop.’”
Sam stuck out her tongue, trying to see how far away her hands were. She guessed a quarter of an inch. She flexed her fingers, trying to elongate the pocket of air. There was nothing to move into. The dirt was packed tightly around her hands, almost like cement.
She tried to glean the position of her body. She wasn’t flat on her back. Her left shoulder was pressed to the ground, but she wasn’t fully lying on her side, either. Her hips were turned at an angle to her shoulders. Cold seeped into the back of her running shorts. Her right knee was bent, her left leg was straight.
Torso twist.
A runner’s stretch. Her body had fallen into a familiar position.
Sam tried to shift her weight. She couldn’t move her legs. She tried her toes. Her calf muscles. Her hamstrings.
Nothing.
Sam closed her eyes. She was paralyzed. She would never walk again, run again, move again without assistance. Panic rushed into her chest like a swarm of mosquitos. Running was all that she had. It was who she was. What was the point of trying to survive if she could never use her legs again?
She pressed her face into her hands so that she wouldn’t cry out.
Charlie could still run. Sam had watched her sister bolt toward the forest. It was the last thing she’d seen before the revolver went off. Sam conjured into her mind the image of Charlie sprinting, her spindly legs moving impossibly fast as she flew forward, away, never hesitating, never stopping to look back.
Don’t think about me, Sam begged, the same thing she had told her sister a million times before. Just concentrate on yourself and keep running.
Had Charlie made it? Had she found help? Or had she looked over her shoulder to see if Sam was following and instead found Zachariah Culpepper’s shotgun jammed into her face?
Or worse.
Sam forced the thought from her mind. She saw Charlie running free, getting help, bringing the police back to the grave because she had their mother’s sense of direction and she never got lost and she would remember where her sister was buried.
Sam counted out the beats of her heart until she felt them slow to a less frantic pace.
And then she felt a tickle in her throat.
Everything was filled with dirt—her ears, nose, mouth, lungs. She couldn’t stop the cough that wanted to come out of her mouth. Her lips opened. The reflexive intake of air pulled more dirt into her nose. She coughed again, then again. The third time was so hard that she felt her stomach cramp as her body strained to pull itself into a ball.
Sam felt a jolt in her heart.
Her legs had twitched.
Panic and fear had cut off the vital connections between her brain and her musculature. She had not been paralyzed; she had been terrified, some ancient fight or flight mechanism pushing her out of her own body until she could understand what was happening. Sam felt elation as sensation slowly returned to her lower body. It was as if she was walking into a pool of water. At first, she could feel her toes spreading through the thick earth. Then her ankles were able to bend. Then she felt the tiniest amount of movement in her ankles.
If she could move her feet, what else could she move?
Sam flexed her calves, warming them up. Her quads started to fire. Her knees tensed. She concentrated on her legs, telling herself that they could move until her body sent back the message that yes, her legs could move.
She was not paralyzed. She had a chance.
Gamma always said that Sam had learned how to run before she’d learned how to walk. Her legs were the strongest part of her body.
She could kick her way out.
Sam worked her legs, making infinitesimal motions back and forth, trying to burrow through the heavy layer of dirt. Her breath grew hot in her hands. A dense fog clouded out the panic in her brain. Was she using up too much air? Did it matter? She kept losing track of what she was doing. Her lower body was moving back and forth and sometimes she found herself thinking she was lying on the deck of a tiny boat rocking on the ocean and then she would come to, would realize that she was trapped underground and struggle to move faster, harder, only to be lulled back onto the boat again.
She tried to count: One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi …
Her legs cramped. Her stomach cramped. Everything cramped. Sam made herself stop, if only for a few seconds. The rest was almost as painful as the effort. Lactic acid boiled off her spent muscles, causing her stomach to churn. Her vertebrae had twisted into overtightened bolts that pinched the nerves and shot an electric pain into her neck and legs. Every breath was caught in her hands like a trapped bird.
“‘There is a fifty percent chance of survival,’” Charlie had read from her Adventure book. “‘But only if the victim is found within one hour.’”
Sam didn’t know how long she’d been in the grave. Like losing the red-brick house, like watching her mother die, that had been a lifetime ago.
She tightened her stomach muscles and tried a sideways push-up. Her arm tensed. Her neck strained. The earth pressed back, grinding her shoulder into the wet soil.
She needed more room.
Sam tried to rock her hips. There was an inch of space at first, then two inches, then she could move her waist, her shoulder, her neck, her head.
Was there suddenly more space between her mouth and her hands?
Sam stuck out her tongue again. She felt the tip brush against the gap between her two palms. That was half an inch, at least.
Progress.
