Page 86 of The Chain House

The Freedom Ranch had become many things over the past two decades of deterioration and decay, and one of them, as preposterously unclean as it was, was as a popular place for teens to hook up. They were far from teenagers, but it was worth a try. As the footsteps came closer, Lizzie leaned down and kissed Trevor on the lips, and then she started slowly grinding on him, stopping only when one of the two men said, “Well, what do we have here?”

Trevor’s head rolled to the right just as Lizzie, above him, turned her head to the left, and they both did their best to act like they’d been unknowingly caught in the act, like they didn’t know these two men were killers and more than likely linked to Minks. Trevor had been meaning to ask Lizzie more about her gun, and if she’d ever used one before, but at least they had one. Had something.

“Don’t stop on our account,” said the white man, who, underneath his fresh stubble and tatted arms and neck, was thin as a rail and tall as a beanstalk. He wore jeans and brown shitkicker boots, an unbuttoned flannel shirt, and a baseball cap pointed backward. He looked at his partner, who was built like The Rock but not nearly as tall. “What do you think, Ray, you think they should stop on our account?”

Ray’s no-nonsense demeanor said clearly that he didn’t want to be there, and he was in a hurry to go. “Let’s just start unloading the shit and go. And don’t be fuckin’ saying my name, motherfucker.”

The lanky white man laughed, pointed his gun lazily toward Ray. “He’s a little uptight sometimes.” He sat in one of the folding chairs that formed the circle around where Trevor and Lizzie lay on the floor and then jerked a nod. “Go on, get to fuckin.’ ”

Ray shook his head and walked out of the room. Seconds later Trevor heard him walking up the stairs, and then on the floorboards directly above them.

Their one-man audience looked up toward the footsteps on the ceiling. “Fucker sounds like he might come right through the floor up there.”

Lizzie had begun to move from Trevor’s waist, holding up a cautious hand in an apologetic, we’ll just get our clothes and get going gesture, but the man wasn’t having it. He pointed the gun directly at her. “I said, go on, get to fuckin.’ ” And moved the gun to Trevor. “And you … get your pants off.” When Trevor didn’t comply, the man said, “You deaf as well as a midget?”

“I heard you just fine,” Trevor said, feeling the raven wings fluttering into a frenzy inside his chest. He glanced toward his bat on the floor across the room and then back to the man. Lizzie gently patted Trevor’s chest, like she was telling him, Stay still, I got this. But he wondered, How? She was half-clothed, and the man was five feet away with a gun aimed at them. Then again, Trevor could feel how calm Lizzie was, straddling him.

“I said get your pants off,” he said. “And you, with the tits, take that top off and show’m to me.”

When Lizzie reached around to unlatch her bra, Trevor said, “Don’t.”

And the man laughed. He scratched the stubble on his cheek. “Got us a stubborn little man.” He leaned forward. “Would you rather see her brains scattered all over the wall? Huh? And what the fuck you two doing in here, anyway? Don’t you read signs … no trespassing?”

“Just wanted to relive some memories from years ago,” Lizzie said. “That’s all.”

“What … did you lose your virginity in here, way back when?”

Ray was still walking on the floor above, and then he started scooting something heavy.

As soon as the man with the gun looked up toward the noise, Lizzie reached down toward where she’d kicked off her shorts and grabbed her gun. Before their man realized what she’d done she’d pulled the trigger, hesitating only slightly, blowing out the man’s right kneecap in an explosion of bloody mist and bone. The man screamed, dropped his gun to the floor as his chair toppled. Above them, Ray’s footfalls quickened, and it sounded like the ceiling might come down under his thunderous steps. Lizzie was quickly on her feet and following the sound of Ray’s movement up above. She fired into the ceiling, once, and then a second time.

The second bullet must have hit him.

Ray screamed, landed somewhere above with a loud, house-shaking thud. By then, Trevor was on his feet, baseball bat in hand. The white man was screaming and reaching for a gun that wasn’t there anymore because Lizzie had it in her other hand. Ray must have been trying to move up there, but it didn’t go well, because next they heard him tumbling down the steps and landing on the bottom floor with an even louder thud than before.

Lizzie nodded toward the stairs in the other room and said to Trevor, “Go check on him.”

Trevor looked at Lizzie in amazement.

She said, “I sneak out to the shooting range more than I let on. Just in case.”

Trevor left the room, less surprised by Lizzie’s apparent transformation than maybe he should have been. He knew firsthand how trauma could transform a person. He approached the stairs with caution. He had the bat positioned over his shoulder and ready to swing should Ray come at him. But when he turned the corner, Ray was an unmoving mess at the bottom of the steps, his arms and legs akimbo, his eyes unblinking as blood leaked from a bullet hole in a neck that looked broken.

Back in the dining room, the other man was still screaming, but with two guns Trevor trusted that Lizzie would be fine while he ran up the stairs to see what Ray had been doing.

It was the same room he’d hid the children in twenty years ago, and stepping into it was like stepping back in time. The closet no longer had a door on it, and if he were to look, he’d bet that Jennifer’s mural had been covered in graffiti years ago, just like the rest of the room’s walls. But what shook Trevor, other than the trail of Ray’s blood across the old floorboards, was the dozens of crates full of weapons and ammunition that took up most of the floor.

They’re preparing for a war, he thought as he removed his cell phone and snapped a few pictures. The man screamed again downstairs, and Trevor left the room in a hurry to join Lizzie. Back in the dining room, he found her standing above the man as he squirmed across the floor in a futile attempt to get away. But she followed, hovering above him, both guns aimed at him as he whimpered and begged for his life.

“Who do you work for?”

“Go fuck yourself, bitch.”

“My husband said the same thing to me this morning,” Lizzie told him. “And you know what? He’s probably nothing but ash right now. Who do you work for?”

When the man didn’t respond, Lizzie stepped on his shattered knee and he wailed, crying and slobbering on the floor, and then, without warning, vomited at the feet of one of the folding chairs. He looked up. “They’re … coming.”

Trevor stepped closer, squatting down with the bat resting on his shoulder. He realized there was still a spot of Jake Hall’s blood on the barrel, and he hoped this bastard noticed it too. “Where is Beth Hawthorne?”