Dad took a shaky breath, then another painstaking step forward. He was less than a foot away now. The fire was bright red on his face, and his wrinkled forehead glistened with sweat. Slowly, painfully, he knelt down. Thunder boomed overhead and he froze for a second, looking at the man’s face, studying it for any hint of consciousness. When he saw none, he reached his hand out little by little until the tips of his fingers brushed the metal keys, then crawled up their length toward the clasp. My stomach was a knot. Dad pinched the clasp open gently and then slowly, achingly slowly, he pulled the keys away and they fell into his palm. My heart leapt. “Put the keys down.”
The man with the scar was up on his knees. An enormous gun grew out of his hand and was pointed directly at Dad’s head. “Now.”
Everything was deadly still for a split second, but then Dad jerked to one side, tossing the keys at me as he did it. “Run!” he shouted.
I scrambled to catch them but the woman sprang up behind me and pushed me down, snatching the keys out of the air. There was a boom, deafening in the steel walls of the plane, as the man’s gun rang out. Thank God he was drunk. The bullet missed Dad by inches and slammed into the ground.
Dad scrambled toward me as the black man woke and pulled his own gun out of its holster. The slavers slid out of their places, weaving in their still-drunk state. Dad didn’t say a word. He leveled the rifle and fired, its report pounding at my ears. The bullet went high, ricocheting with a wet-sounding ping. The men stumbled backward, surprised.
“We don’t want any trouble,” Dad announced.
“They’re ours,” the man with the scar slurred in a deep Southern accent.
Dad kept his voice level. “Not anymore.”
The slaver laughed. It sounded like a landslide, boulders tumbling together. He slapped his partner in the chest and they got on their feet and came toward us.
“Get back,” Dad commanded, backing up and jutting the rifle out in front of him, but the men just laughed and kept coming. They must have heard the fear that had crept into his voice. They saw us for what we were. We were no heroes.
I backed out of the plane. The woman and the boy were already gone. As I stepped outside the slavers’ jeep was revving up and pulling away.
“Wait!” I screamed, but the woman didn’t even look back as she took off with the boy beside her. Red taillights glowed in their wake.
Dad tumbled out of the plane and fired two more shots over the men’s heads, sending them ducking inside. Then he turned and headed toward me.
“Run,” he called. “Go!”
The two slavers emerged from the plane behind him. “Dad! Look out!”
Drunk or not, the man with the scar moved fast. He was on Dad in a second, grabbing the top of his backpack and yanking him backward. Dad lost the rifle and his pack, but he whipped around and threw a punch that glanced off the man’s head. It didn’t do much damage but it knocked him back, into the mud. The black man came at him now.
Dad turned and screamed, “Just go!” as the man slammed into his back and they hit the ground, grappling in the mud. The man with the scar was coming at Dad from behind so I scooped up the rifle and swung it by the barrel like a club. The heavy stock struck him on the back of the head and sent him down again.
Dad reared back and threw a solid punch to the black man’s face, dropping him into the mud with his partner.
“Run!” Dad yelled again.
We took off, blind from the pounding rain that turned the world around us a featureless gray. Paolo brayed as we passed him. There was no other choice. We’d have to come back for him. We’d never escape with him in tow.
I couldn’t tell if the men were chasing us or the woman, so I just ran, cradling the mud-covered rifle in my arms, desperately trying to keep up with Dad, who was little more than a flickering shadow darting ahead of me. The thunder pounded constantly, atomic blasts of it, following blue-white flares of lightning. Every time, I ducked instinctively, like I was expecting a shower of shrapnel to follow.
Who knows how long we ran, or how far. At some point I crashed into what felt like an oak tree. I tried to dodge around it, but then I looked up and saw it was Dad.
“Do you see them?” He had to lean right down by my ear and shout for me to hear him at all.
“I can’t see anything!”
Dad turned all around, sheets of water coursing off his head and shoulders. I wanted to scream that it was pointless, that we needed to keep running, but then there was another flash of lightning and a crack, and for a second it seemed like there might be a ridge of some kind out ahead of us. Dad grabbed my elbow and pulled us toward it.
“Come on! Maybe there’s shelter!”
By then, the ground had turned to a slurry of mud and rocks and wrecked grass. Every few steps my feet would sink into it and I’d have to pull myself out one foot at a time, terrified that I’d lose sight of Dad and be lost out in that gray nothing, forever.
As we ran, the ridge ahead of us became more and more solid, a looming black wall. I prayed for a cave, but even a good notch in the rock wall would have been enough to get us out of the rain and hide until morning. We were only about fifty feet from it when Dad came to an abrupt halt.
“Why are we stopping?!”
Dad didn’t say anything, he simply pointed.
Between us and the ridge there was an immense gash in the earth, a gorge some thirty feet across and another thirty deep, with steep, muddy walls on our side and the ridge on the opposite. A boiling mess of muddy water, tree stumps, and trash raged at the bottom.
Dad searched left and right for a crossing, but there wasn’t any. His shoulders slumped. Even through the curtain of rain I could see the sunken hollow of his eyes, deep red-lined pits that sat in skin as gray as the air around us.
“I’m sorry, Stephen. I swear to God, I’m so sorry.”
I reached out for his arm, to tell him it was going to be okay, that we’d be fine, but before my fingers could even graze his soaked coat, the ground beneath his feet disappeared. What was solid ground turned to mud in an instant and he went flailing, flying backward. There was a flash of lightning as he fell, arms pinwheeling, his mouth open in a shocked O. There was nothing at his back but thirty feet of open air and, beyond that, the bared fangs of a raging river.
When the lightning subsided, he was gone.
FIVE
I didn’t think, I just jumped, sliding down the muddy wall, then tumbling end over end when it collapsed beneath me. I hit a small piece of ground at the bottom, a tiny shore, and pulled myself up out of the mud.
“Dad!” I screamed, searching the river and the opposite shore for some sign of him, but it was useless. “Dad!”
Another lightning flash and I caught a glimpse of something large in the water, moving fast downstream. I tugged off my pack, stripped down to my shorts and T-shirt, and dove in.
The icy water ripped the breath out of me as soon as I hit it. I had to struggle to move and get my blood flowing again. It took all my strength to stay focused on the big shadow in the water downstream and avoid the outcroppings of rock and the logs that shot by. I knew it could have been anything — a tree, or a clot of mud and rock — but I dug my arms hard into the cold water, praying, pulling for it.
I was only a few feet away when a flash of something dark and a thrashing arm shot up out of the churn. Yes! I stabbed my arms into the water and managed to get ahold of the collar of his coat. I pulled him to me but only had him for a second before we slammed sideways into a rock jutting out of the water. Dad shot away again headfirst down the river. He wasn’t moving. His body was limp, tossed about and swept away by the current.