End Game

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Markhams put Graham on edge. They were too… nice. They were so intent on being cheerful that they never asked a question about him, not even how he was doing, the gold standard for meaningless questions.

After Deputy Price handed him off, all the Markhams talked about was how safe he was, and how happy they were to have him as part of their family. He didn’t bother to tell them that he had no desire to be part of their family. He didn’t want to be part of their neighborhood or their tribe, or even their thoughts. He wanted life to be what it was thirty hours ago, and the fact that that was not possible didn’t do anything to change the reality of the wish.

“Let us know if you need anything,” Peter Markham said. “I know this is a tough time, and we want to make it as easy for you as possible.”

“I hope you like dogs,” Anita Markham said. “We have a poodle who loves people.”

Graham considered lying telling them that he was deathly allergic to dogs just to mess with their heads, but decided not to. They meant well, and while his Stranger Danger Spidey-senses were going crazy, they seemed like nice enough people and they were trying their best to help him.

But he was scared — more scared than he’d ever been of anything at any time in his life — and he knew that it was a mistake to trust anyone.

Except, sooner or later, you had to, right? He was only fourteen years old. He knew he was smart and he knew that he could be tough when he had to be, but there was a whole lot of the world that remained out of reach for someone his age. He couldn’t drive and he couldn’t earn a living. Where would he live—how would he live — if he didn’t ultimately trust someone? He’d have no choice. The question would be deciding who that trustworthy person would be. So far, all he knew for certain was that he wasn’t allowed to trust any of the people that everyone else was supposed to depend on. According to Jolaine, the police were his enemy, and so was the FBI. Who else? And if those people were the enemy, how was he supposed to decide who were his friends?

Was it safe to assume, just because the Markhams had picked him up, that they were automatically on the trustworthy list?

For the time being, it didn’t matter. He was in their backseat and the car was moving. Unless he wanted to take a header out the door onto the road, he was pretty much stuck with one option, and that was to enjoy the ride.

The three of them drove in silence through the darkness. From the backseat, all Graham saw were trees. They passed quickly in the wash of the headlights.

“How far do we have to go?” Graham asked. It felt like they’d been on the road for over an hour.

“So you do have a voice,” Peter said with a laugh. “For a while there, we were wondering. Nice to meet you.”

It was a teasing attempt at being friendly, of striking up a conversation, but Graham wondered if they had any idea how many bullets had been fired at him in the past day. If they did, maybe they’d understand that his sense of humor wasn’t everything it used to be.

“It’s not that far,” Anita said. “Maybe twenty minutes. Are you okay? Do you need to stop?”

“I’m okay,” he said.

Peter shot him a look over his shoulder. “We’re really sorry you’re having to go through all this,” he said. “I don’t know the details of your particular case — and I don’t need to unless you want to talk about it — but if it makes you feel any better at all, we deal with a lot of kids who are in the same position as you, and this night — the first night — is almost always the very worst. Things get better from here.”

More nice words from a man who clearly had no freaking clue what he was talking about. His father was almost certainly dead, his mother had been badly wounded, and the people who did it to them were now trying to hunt down the survivors. For all Graham knew, one of those survivors — himself — had been successfully hunted down and now was being taken to a place he didn’t know to endure whatever was coming. Where in all of that was any possibility that the worst was over?

When you can’t say something nice… Graham opted to say nothing.

A few seconds later, the car slowed. Then it slowed some more.

“What’s wrong?” Anita asked.

“This guy behind me,” Peter replied. “He’s been on my tail for the last five miles. I’m giving him a chance to pass.”

Graham looked out the back window into the headlights of the vehicle behind them. They were too bright for him to tell whether they belonged to a car or a truck, but they were very close. They made no effort to pass. Graham’s heart rate doubled.

“Go faster,” he said.

“Oh, no,” Peter said. “I’m not getting caught up in road—”

“They’re going to try to take me,” Graham said. Hearing the edge in his own voice raised his anxiety levels even higher.

“What?” Anita said.

Peter laughed. “Whoa, Graham—”

“Whoa yourself, Peter,” Graham snapped. He didn’t know how he was as certain as he was, but there was zero doubt in his mind that he was correct. This was the hit team. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere. This is exactly the right place.”

“Perhaps a few too many FPS games there, young man,” Peter said.

Graham recognized FPS as first-person shooter games, and he hated them. “Did they tell you that people tried to murder my whole family?” Graham asked. “Did they tell you that my mom is in some secret hospital, and that my friggin’ au pair is really a bodyguard and she’s being hunted down, too?” Graham knew damn well that no one had told them that because until right now, Graham hadn’t told anyone either.

“You’re making that up,” Anita said. But he heard the doubt in her voice. The fear.

“No, I’m not,” Graham said. “Why would I—” He cut himself off. He wanted to live, not argue. “If you don’t believe me, speed up.”

“Why?”

“If they speed up, too, then we’ll know I’m right.”

“I don’t want to know you’re right,” Anita said. Fear had hijacked her voice and transformed it into a squeak.

“Okay, then,” Graham negotiated. “If they don’t, then we’ll know I’m wrong.”

Peter said nothing, but the engine noise grew as their car accelerated. Graham saw the concern in Peter’s eyes as his gaze darted between the road and the rearview mirror. Graham undid his seat belt so he could turn around in the seat. “They’re not falling behind,” he announced.

“So I noticed,” Peter said. He picked up more speed, but the distance between the two cars actually decreased.

“My God, Peter,” Anita said. “Slow down. You’ll kill us all.”

“No!” Graham shouted. “Better him killing us all than them killing us all.”

“Peter, come on,” Anita coaxed. “Be reasonable. This can’t be true. We don’t even know this boy.”

“You don’t need to know me. I don’t know you, either. Just don’t stop!”

Peter fixed him with his eyes in the mirror, then glanced beyond him into the lights of their pursuer. He backed off the accelerator.

“What are you doing?” Graham shouted. “We’ve got to go faster.”

“No, we don’t,” Peter said. “We’ve established that they’re trying to follow us. It’s not important to outrun them. As long as we keep moving, nothing changes. We’ll drive to a public place — a restaurant parking lot or maybe a firehouse or police station. Whatever needs to be settled can be settled there.”

“I’m calling the police,” Anita said. She dug in her purse for her cell phone.

Graham started to object out of reflex, then realized that that was a pretty good idea.

Anita stared at her phone.

“What’s wrong?” Peter asked.

“No signal,” she said.

He sighed. “Yeah, this is a real dead zone in here.”

Dead zone. Did he really just say dead zone?

“Turn around and buckle in, Graham,” Peter said. “You staring out the window doesn’t help anyone. We’re going to be—”

Anita yelled, “Look out!”

Graham was still turning when Peter slammed on the brakes, and before he had a chance to register anything that was going on, he found himself rebounding off the back of Anita’s seat on his way to land on the floor of the backseat.

“Oh, my God!” she screamed. “It’s a trap! They set up a roadblock!”

Graham hadn’t seen it yet, but he didn’t have to. Didn’t want to. His ribs landed hard on the hump on the floor, and something sharp jabbed his leg — he thought maybe it was an ice scraper left over from last winter.

“Run!” he shouted, and he scrabbled along the floor to find the door handle.

He still hadn’t looked when he pulled the latch and pushed the back door open on Anita’s side. He expected gunfire at any second, so he kept his head down as he spilled onto the road. He hit first on his back, lighting up the pain in his ribs, but then he rolled to his hands and knees, found his feet, and took off at a run.

“There!” someone yelled. It was a man’s voice and it was heavily accented. “He is running away!” That extra bit allowed Graham to recognize that accent as Chechen. Friends of his parents, perhaps? Were they here to help? Were they among the people it was safe for him to trust?

No. Trust no one. He ran.

“Graham!” The man yelled. “Do not run! We are here to help.”

Bullshit.

Graham lowered his head and concentrated on the wall of leaves and branches that lay ahead of him. They were going to hurt when he ran into them at this speed, but the fact that they were dense and it was dark meant that they would be able to provide him with shelter. He’d just have to duck in far enough to be covered, and then he could hunker down—

“Your mother sent me!” the man yelled. He panted through the words, which seemed to be coming from less far away.

Graham didn’t dare look behind. He didn’t dare do anything that might slow him down. He wished now that Jolaine had bought him running shoes instead of—

A heavy hand landed between his shoulder blades, a shove that sent him face-first into the ground. He got his hands out in time to catch himself, and they slid through rocks and sticks, tearing the hide from the heels of his hands, and also from his knees. He reflexively clenched his teeth to keep his jaws from snapping together and maybe biting his tongue.

Once splayed out and stabilized, he struggled to find his feet again, but it was too late. The man was on him. The collar of Graham’s T-shirt went tight as the guy pulled on it, and then he felt another hand on his arm as he was lifted to his feet.

Graham struggled against the man’s strength, wriggling like a grounded fish to break his hold. He got his arm free, and used the momentum to spin and try to back out of his shirt. He heard the fabric tear, and he felt the constriction release a little, but then the man punched him. Graham didn’t see it, but it felt like a closed fist and it landed hard on the exact spot where the center hump had nailed him when they screeched to a stop.

The blow triggered a cough and Graham tasted blood. His knees sagged.

“I am sorry, Graham,” the man said. “I do not mean to hurt you. You leave me no choice. I hope I hurt not too bad.”

“Leave me alone!” Graham yelled, but it was a weak sound. He took a step to run again, but knew it would be a wasted effort. Whatever the guy had hit had ruined the wiring of his chest. It didn’t hurt so much as it didn’t work anymore. He couldn’t take a full breath.

“The pain will pass soon,” the man said. “I am sorry. You must come with me now.”

Through his gasps for air, Graham managed to ask, “Who are you?” Looking up at the man, he saw no features. Perhaps it was the darkness of the night, but perhaps he was wearing a mask. Graham thought that to be more likely the case.

“If you promise to walk with me, I will promise not to hurt you anymore. Do we have a deal?”

Graham nodded. “Yes,” he said. Even as the words left his lips, he knew that it was a deal that he wouldn’t hesitate to break.

“Good,” the man said. “Let us walk back to the cars.”

As they made the walk back, Graham saw for the first time what the Markhams had seen before they slammed on the brakes. Two pickup trucks had blocked the entire road. If they had continued to speed, as Graham had wanted them to do, God only knows what might have happened. They’d probably all be dead. There was absolutely zero room for them to have sneaked by.

“Who are you?” Graham asked again.

“That doesn’t really matter,” the man said. There was a dismissiveness — a finality — to his tone that told Graham that it would be useless to ask that question again.

He’d run farther than he’d thought, probably a hundred yards. It took a long time to negotiate the walk back, and the trip was made longer still by the fact that somewhere in the encounter, Graham had run out of one of the replacement flip-flops they’d issued to him at the police station. It was annoying enough walking on one that he paused in the stroll back to pull the other one off and walk barefoot.

“I have him,” his escort said to the crowd that had gathered around the Markhams’ car. Peter and Anita had been pulled out, and were standing on the passenger side — the side closest to Graham — with their hands on their heads. They both looked terrified.

“What is going on?” Peter demanded. “Why are you doing this? We’ve done nothing wrong.”

Graham thought he might have been hearing his own words from a few hours ago being recited back to him. “I’m sorry,” he said to Anita as he passed within speaking distance. “I tried to warn you.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him to a stop. “What did you tell them?” The malevolence in the man’s tone told him that he’d accidentally crossed some kind of line.

“Nothing,” Graham said, but he knew that the word had come out too quickly. “Nothing that they probably didn’t already know.” He tried to make eye contact with the man he was speaking to and saw that he was in fact wearing a mask — the kind you would wear in the middle of winter to prevent frostbite on your nose, but made of a lighter material.

“I see,” the man said. He looked over at Anita, who stood maybe ten feet away, and at Peter, who stood three feet farther.

From somewhere under his shirt, the masked man produced a pistol. He pointed it at Anita and fired a single bullet through her forehead. She dropped straight down, as if her body had been unplugged.

Graham didn’t know if the voice he heard yelling was his own or if it was Peter’s. Two seconds later, he knew it was Peter’s voice because it fell silent as the gunman’s second bullet caught the man in the mouth and killed him instantly.

“There,” the gunman said. “Now it doesn’t matter what you told them.”