Down the Darkest Road

60

“I want to kill her,” Greg Hewitt said. “Let me do her now. Before I fucking pass out.”

Ballencoa sighed impatiently and climbed back out of the van. The men began to argue over who would be allowed to commit what atrocity in what order.

Lauren wrapped her fingers around the handle of her weapon.

“Remember what I told you,” she whispered to Leah.

Her daughter nodded, clutching the screwdriver close to her chest.

“Where are my journals?” Ballencoa asked his cohort.

“They’re in a bag. She’s laying on it.”

“I don’t want blood on them.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Hewitt groused, pushing himself away from the car. “I’ll get the goddamn books. I told you you’re an idiot for keeping them.”

Lauren could hear him breathing hard, as if he’d been running. Please let him pass out, she thought. If Hewitt could be taken out of the equation, they might have a chance.

“I don’t care what you think,” Ballencoa said. “I’ll get them myself.”

He came back inside the van, muttering, a wicked long hunting knife in his hand.

As he bent to cut the zip tie from her wrist, Lauren twisted around and swung the hammer, catching him a glancing blow across the brow. She struck at him again, just above the ear, unable to get a good swing going in the close confines of the van.

Ballencoa cried out, as much from shock as from pain. He scrambled backward, trying to get away from her. Lauren swung again, missing entirely.

Bleeding, cursing, Ballencoa tumbled out of the back of the van, tangling his legs and falling. Lauren got to her knees, grabbing at Leah, pulling her, pushing her toward the back of the van.

“Leah, run!” she screamed. “Run!!”

She flung herself out of the van, her body colliding with Ballencoa’s as he tried to regain his feet. He hit the ground beneath her, cushioning her fall, the breath going out of him in a grunt as her knee rammed into his belly.

Leah leapt out of the vehicle and dodged to the side like a cat as the blond man tried to snatch her out of the air. He caught her by one arm and yanked her toward him.

Screaming and screaming, Leah swung wildly with the screwdriver. The tool caught him in the face, sinking into his cheek, hitting bone and teeth. He staggered backward, howling, grabbing at the handle of the instrument with one hand.

For the briefest flash of a second, Leah stared in horror at what she’d done. Then she heard her mother’s voice screaming.

“Leah, run!!”

Leah ran. She had lost her shoes before she was thrown into the van. Rocks and twigs bit into the soles of her feet through her thin pink socks.

They were in the small mountains west of Oak Knoll, a range of red stone and scrub. There were no trees here. There was no forest to hide in. There was brush and chaparral and shale that shifted and slipped out from under her feet as she ran.

The only thing Leah could do was run downhill until she reached the road. And even then she wouldn’t be guaranteed safety. They were in the middle of nowhere. There might not be another car on that road for hours or days.

She tried to run faster than her legs could go, and she tripped herself and fell hard to her hands and knees. Crying and choking, and gasping for breath, she pushed herself to her feet and looked over her shoulder.

She had gone maybe fifty yards from the van. Her mother was still fighting. Ballencoa had gotten up and he and the other man had her trapped at the back of the van.

Run no matter what, her mother had told her.

Her mother had also told her to be brave.

Leah didn’t think the two things went together.

She had lost her weapon, leaving it stuck in the face of the man who had come into her home and beaten her.

This was what happened to Leslie, she kept thinking. These men had taken her and killed her, and now they would kill her mother too.

Leah had never been so afraid in her life. She wanted Daddy. She wanted Mommy. She had no one. No one was going to save them.

Her hand brushed against something dangling from the belt loop of her breeches.

The steel hoof pick the Gracidas’s farrier had given her.

She unclipped it from the belt loop and fixed it in her hand like a claw. It wasn’t much, but it was what she had.

Be brave, Leah, she heard her mother say as she turned around and ran back toward the van to try to save her mother’s life.

Lauren kept the hammer poised in front of her as she backed toward the van.

Hewitt was coming from her right. He had pulled Leah’s screwdriver out of his face and held it now like a dagger. He was a monster with his once-handsome face smashed and torn and oozing blood. He was trying to shout, trying to curse. The sounds were garbled and grotesque. His tongue was swelling out of his mouth, dripping blood.

He staggered side to side as he came at her with the screwdriver clutched in his one good hand, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

Ballencoa came at her from her left, his face twisted with rage, spewing obscenities. The hunting knife had come out of his hand as they had tumbled to the ground, but he had recovered it, and he came at her with it now.

They were both too close. If she backed up any more, they would have her trapped against the van.

She bolted like a cornered horse, banging hard into Hewitt. He careened sideways, losing his balance, and they went down in a heap of tangled legs and arms. He lost the screwdriver but grabbed at her with his one good hand as Lauren scrambled frantically to get away from him.

He snatched hold of her ankle, yanking her leg out from under her. Lauren kicked and struggled like a drowning swimmer to free herself, getting first one foot under her, then the other.

She hadn’t taken two strides when Ballencoa was on her. He hit her hard between the shoulder blades, knocking the breath from her, and she hit the ground hard, rocks biting into her flesh.

The hammer came out of her hand. She grabbed at it, fingernails breaking as her fingertips hit nothing but dirt and stone.

This wasn’t what she’d had in mind, she thought dimly as her vision blurred and darkened around the edges. How many times had she imagined having Roland Ballencoa on his knees, begging her for his life? A thousand? A million?

In her dreams he told her where Leslie was before she shot him dead.

Body. Body. Head shot. Breathe . . .

Leah saw her mother try to run. She saw her fall. She could hear nothing but the pounding of her pulse in her head and the pounding of her feet against the earth as she ran. She had never run so hard or so fast in her life, and still terror gripped her throat at the idea that she couldn’t run fast enough to get to her mother in time.

Ballencoa had a knife. The light flashed off the blade as he brought it up, and flashed off it again as he brought it down and plunged it into her mother’s back.

“NO!!!!” Leah screamed.

She launched herself at his back, slamming into him so hard she almost knocked the wind from herself. She struck at him with the steel pick in her hand over and over and over. Like a giant claw, it tore at him, ripping hair and flesh from the back of his head, from the back of his neck.

His body twisted and bucked beneath her as he tried to fling her off. Leah clung to him like a limpet, sobbing and stabbing at him with the hoof pick until he finally shook free of her and flung her into the dirt.

Then he was on his feet and he had hold of her, his hands crushing her arms to her sides as he picked her up. He lifted her and turned and threw her into the back of the van like a sack of trash.

Leah cried out as she landed hard. Then Ballencoa was over her, and his hands were around her throat. He was screaming at her, but she couldn’t hear him. His face was twisted and dark like a demon from a dream.

This was the last thing Leslie saw, Leah thought as she tried in vain to struggle and her consciousness began to dim.

Lauren struggled to turn over. Ballencoa’s weight was gone, but her own body felt as heavy as lead. It seemed to take every ounce of strength she had to lift a foot, to move a hand. The world had gone to slow motion, black and white, no sound.

She saw him lift Leah off the ground and hurl her into the back of the van. In her mind she screamed NO!!! But no sound came out of her.

She moved a hand . . . a foot . . . She bent a knee . . .

Hewitt lay on the ground where she had tripped over him. He might have been dead. She hoped so.

She struggled to suck in a breath, to get up on one knee.

She had a clear view of the back of the van. Ballencoa had one hand at Leah’s throat, the other tearing at her breeches.

This was what he had done to Leslie. He had stolen her off the side of the road. He had brought her to a place like this and stolen her innocence in the most vile and violent way he could.

Lauren hadn’t been there to stop him.

She was here now.

In her blindness to gain justice for one daughter, she had put the other in exactly the same brutal, horrible place to face the same brutal, horrible death.

No.

No.

NO !

NOOO!!!!

Lauren didn’t know if the sound came out of her or exploded only in her brain. It didn’t matter. It came from the deepest part of her and brought with it a wave of strength.

She grabbed the hammer as she got to her feet and turned it in her hands.

Not my daughter, she thought. Not again. Never again.

She brought the hammer up with both hands.

His attention was on Leah. He turned too late.

Lauren brought the hammer down, claw side first, with every last ounce of strength she had.

The claw caught him between the temple and the ear, driving into flesh and bone and brain. The force of the blow knocked him sideways away from Leah, away from the van. The look on his face was one of stunned horror.

He stuck out his arms, flailing like a blind man to break his fall as his legs buckled and he went down, the hammer still embedded in the side of his skull.

The look in his eyes was both wild and blank, and the sounds coming from him were guttural alien babble. His body began to jerk and jump as the electrical system of his brain shorted out and seized.

Lauren leaned hard against the van, watching him die even as she felt her own life slipping out of her, running out of her with the blood that flowed from the knife wound in her back.

“Mommy!” Leah cried, hysterical, flinging herself into her mother.

Lauren wrapped her arms around her daughter and held her as tightly as she could.

“It’s over, baby,” she whispered again and again. “It’s over. It’s over.”

It’s over.

At last.