Page 7 of Travis
It was the reason everyone assumed I never left my house.
Out here, it was also the reason I was still alive.
I moved through the trees in a low crouch, circling east. The ground was soft with pine needles and old logging debris. I placed each foot deliberately, feeling for branches or loose rock before committing my weight. The vest pressed against my taped ribs with every breath, and I let the pain meter the rhythm—step, breathe, step, breathe—until I reached the northeast corner of the building.
I held there. Listened.
There were voices inside. Low, bored, the cadence of two men who had been sitting in one place for too long and had run out of things to say to each other. One of them laughed. The generator hummed. Nothing moved in the lot.
No sound at all from the three smaller signatures Maude had identified in the northeast corner.
I pulled the gaiter up over my nose and mouth. Standard cold-weather gear, the kind sold at every sporting goods store in the state. It covered enough. Combined with the dark jacket and the night, I was a shape. Nothing more.
The north window latch gave with a push. I was inside in four seconds, despite my screaming ribs.
The room I entered was dark, separated from the main space by a plywood partition that didn’t reach the ceiling. Storage. Empty shelves, a rusted toolbox, the smell of old oil and cold concrete. Through the gap above the partition, the fluorescent light from the main room threw a sick yellow stripe across the ceiling.
I went over the partition instead of around it. Quieter. The plywood flexed under my weight but held, and I dropped into the space behind the two men without either of them hearing it.
The first one was sitting in a folding chair with a handgun on the table beside him. I hit him from behind—a precise strike to the base of the skull that dropped him out of the chair and onto the floor before his hand got within six inches of the weapon.
The second man was already moving. He’d heard the chair and was on his feet, reaching for the small of his back where he kept whatever he kept. I closed the distance before he got there, but he was bigger than me and he used his size to drive his shoulder into the left side of my ribs that were already fucking taped. Goddamn it. The pain that went through me was white and total and nearly put me on the floor.
I didn’t go down. I couldn’t go down.
I caught his arm on the draw and redirected it. He swung with the other hand, and it connected across my jaw, a detonation of heat that I felt through my whole skull.
We hit the concrete together, his weight on top, my back on cold floor that knocked the air out of me. I hooked my arm under his throat and locked my hands together, squeezed until his body bucked and then went slack. Until the only sound was the fluorescent buzz and my own breathing, ragged and too loud in the cinder-block room.
I zip-tied both of them. Wrists, ankles. Weapons cleared. Two men unconscious on the floor, and the whole thing had taken less than ninety seconds.
My ribs were still screaming. Something on the left side had shifted. I didn’t think it was broken, but the tape wasn’t holding anymore and every breath felt like a bad decision.
I pressed my hand against my side, and it came away dry. No blood. That was enough for now.
The fluorescent light hummed above me, and I wanted to shoot it. I wanted to shoot it more than I wanted to shoot either of the men on the floor. But the three small signatures on Maude’s thermal scan were in the next room, and they didn’t need to hear a gunshot.
I found them behind a locked interior door. Padlocked from the outside with a hardware store combination lock that took me eight seconds to bypass.
I opened it slowly.
The first time I’d done this, I’d gone straight in. Gaiter up over most of my face, I’d slammed the door open and rushed in to get them. Not realizing that in a dark room, a masked stranger bursting in was not a source of comfort.
A girl had screamed so hard she’d hyperventilated, and I’d stood there not understanding why the thing that protected my identity was the thing that terrified her most. I’d learned after that. Now I spoke first. Before they could see me. Before they could build me into something worse than what I was.
I was fucking bad enough as is.
“I’m here to take you somewhere safe,” I said through the cracked door, low and steady. “I’m going to open this door and come in. My face is covered, but I’m not going to hurt you. I need you to stand up and follow me. Can you do that?”
Nothing. Then a shuffle on the other side. Feet on concrete. Movement, not speech.
I opened the door. Kept my hands visible, palms open, at my sides. Made myself small. Made myself slow.
Three kids, maybe eight or nine years old. Two girls and a boy, sitting on the floor against the far wall in a space that had no furniture and one blanket between them. The fluorescent light was worse in here—no shade, no diffusion, just that raw tube bolted to the ceiling, droning. I blinked against it.
The kids watched me with an expression I’d seen before and would never get used to—a stillness that children aren’t built for. Someone had told them what would happen if they made noise. Once was probably enough.
The boy stood up first. Then the girls, one pulling the other by the hand. They moved in a cluster, pressed together, watching me with those flat, assessing eyes that no child should have perfected.
