As soon as Adam had made it to the door with Rob hanging unconsciously at his arm, I pushed the cop I had been holding onto out of my arms and into the center of the room.
“Any of you moves in the next five minutes to reach for a gun or make a phone call, I’m going to kill him,” I said as I motioned toward Rob who wasn’t lucid enough to have any idea what was going on. The cops stood around looking agitated, but obedient as we dragged one of their own out the door unconscious. I did manage to notice that a few of them had a different look brewing beneath the surface though, and it made me aware that not all of them were totally buying into this being a random hijacking.
As soon as we cleared the door and were out onto the street, we started running with guns still drawn. It took all of about two seconds for the now-armed cops to pursue us and since they weren’t dragging dead weight, they were much faster and we wouldn’t be able to outrun them.
This was a really, really bad plan.
Adam turned around and fired a shot at the crowd of cops, and it looked like he might have hit one of them in the knee. For a second, the cops didn’t return the fire. My guess was that they were afraid a shot might hit their fellow officer who was hanging between our shoulders now. But that didn’t last long before the sound of shots being fired rang in the air around us. Either they figured out this was a rescue attempt and not a kidnapping, or they just didn’t care whether they hit Rob in the crossfire. Either way, it wasn’t good for us. The only thing that we had to our advantage was a keen understanding of the woods.
“This way,” I shouted at Adam, as we ducked into a corner alley behind two brick buildings.
“Isn’t this a dead end?” Adam asked.
“Only if you stick to the street,” I answered.
I could feel Adam’s stare of confusion against the side of my face, but we didn’t have time for me to explain the intricacies of the web of streets in this town right now. Instead, I pulled him and Rob’s unconscious body into one of the back doors of a Chinese restaurant. We hurried through the galley kitchen and out the side door and back out onto a different street.
“Wicked,” Adam said, impressed when he realized that the businesses connected the streets if you passed through them—something that I doubted most of those cops even knew about.
After a few minutes, we were heading toward the mountains and were almost to the edge of the tree line. I stopped and turned around for a minute to listen and look over my shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Adam asked, looking slightly panicked that we weren’t still running at full throttle.
“Making sure that we aren’t being followed,” I answered.
“Are we?”
“No,” I said as I turned back around and resumed pace.
We wove straight into the woods and disappeared into the mountains. It was snowing, and a fresh dusting of powdery white was falling in thick layers onto the ground, which was also good for us. By the time they figured out that we might have escaped into the mountains, the tracks would be completely covered. The more that we walked into the woods, the more my muscles and bones ached from carrying Rob’s dead weight, and the more I realized that our plan might not have been as bad as we feared it might have been.
“That must have been quite a hit,” I said to Adam, as Rob’s weight started to bury our feet in the deep snow and make the journey twice as difficult as it was before. “I can’t believe that he’s still unconscious from one hit.”
“It’s something I learned on the streets,” Adam said as we both huffed and tried to talk at the same time while we dragged Rob along between our shoulders. “There’s a spot on the temple, that if you hit it just right, it can knock someone out for hours. Not a good idea to try it unless you know exactly what spot you’re aiming for though.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you hit them wrong, you can completely fracture the skull.”
“You’re more of a badass than I even thought,” I said as I glanced over at Adam with a healthy dose of respect.
We walked until it got so dark that we couldn’t even see our feet beneath us, and then we kept walking even after that. The night was too cloudy to let much of the moon’s light through, but we had no supplies to stop and spend the night in the woods, so we had no choice but to keep on walking. Fortunately, we had walked this path multiple times now and could probably find our way back to the cave blindfolded, which was good because that was equivalent to our current situation. We only stumbled once, and that was because of a fallen tree log. It was a big enough stumble that it sent us both reeling onto the ground, which surprisingly didn’t wake up Rob. When we got back to our feet, we were covered in a cold, wet snow that seeped into our clothes and made our muscles stiffen and ache. But I didn’t give any thought to the cold, or my screaming body that was ready to lay down and give up. Even when the night winds picked up and made it feel as though my skin was being scraped off with a vegetable peeler, I only thought about getting back to the cave and to Lisette. I knew that she would be worried—panicked even, until we got back. I needed to get there in time before she let her worries consume her and made a rash decision to come looking for us or something equally as dangerous.
“How close are we?” I asked Adam.
He stopped walking for a minute, and it felt like he was looking around, although I doubted that there was any possible way that he could have seen anything in the dark.
“It should be right around here,” he answered.
We walked on a bit more. After just a few minutes had passed, the smell of burning wood and a very soft amber glow appeared in the near distance—the cave. We hastened our steps and nearly ran on numb and frozen feet toward the light. I pushed my limbs to the point that I could feel my rigid and frozen tendons tearing. It was worth it. Anything was worth it in order to finally have made it back to the cave with Lisette.
As soon as we got to the mouth of the cave, I could see the small, dying bonfire and the tent. But it wasn’t Lisette’s tent.
“Lisette?” I called out as Adam and I carefully set Rob down on the floor of the cavern.
In a flurry, Lisette came out of the tent and ran up into my arms with such force that it nearly knocked the wind out of me when she threw her arms around my neck.
“Oh my god!” she cried as I hugged her back as tightly as I could. “You’re half-frozen to death!”
She looked over my shoulder to see Adam standing there in the opening of the cave with lips the color of the ocean, and Rob slumped against the backpack on the floor that Adam had used as a makeshift pillow for his head. I let her go for a second even though I felt like I was living off her body heat, so that she could give Adam a hug too.
“Is he okay?” she asked, looking at Rob on the ground.
“Yeah,” Adam answered. “I sort of had to knock him out in order to get him to come with us.”
She looked at him in shock, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the fact that Adam had knocked Rob unconscious or because she couldn’t believe we had been able to drag him all the way here in a single venture. When someone else suddenly walked out from the tent, I grabbed my gun reflexively since I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be here except for Lisette, but my frozen fingers clumsily clamored to hold onto the gun as it slipped through my fingers and hit against the ground, letting out a shot that thankfully didn’t hit anyone. The noise was enough to startle everyone and finally wake up Rob, who sat up quickly and heaved in a great breath as if he had thought he was drowning. Lisette dropped down on her knees beside him to calm him down, and I turned to face the woman standing at the opening of the tent.
“Stacy?” I asked in surprise.
Everyone turned to look at her, even Rob who seemed to be the most shocked that she was here.
“What are you doing here?” Rob asked her. “Fuck, what am I doing here?”
He rubbed the side of his temple, which I bet was still throbbing after the blow that Adam gave him, and Lisette handed him some water out of a canteen.
“I thought that you had taken off already,” I said as I turned back to Stacy. “We figured you would be long gone by now.”
“I couldn’t just run away and leave my partner behind,” she said as she glanced over toward Rob.
