“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