Shoreline Page 15

  “Anna!” shouted Nora, her palm against the glass.

  The girl was sufficiently convinced now. She cracked open the sliding door, just wide enough so that Nora could speak into the phone she still held. Her rifle stance relaxed somewhat.

  “Oh my God, Nora. Where are you? We’ve moved heaven and earth looking for you—is Pete alright?”

  “Yes, Anna, for the moment—they took us both—some kind of compound on the lake. We need … We need to move right now. They have April Lewis, they have Pete—his foot is hurt, he couldn’t get away. They have … weapons. People … I’m scared they’ll hurt them because I ran.…”

  “Nora, you’ve got to calm down—Where are you?” came Anna’s voice.

  Nora looked hopelessly around her, as though some sign might appear. “I have no idea, Anna.”

  “Planer,” said the girl, her eyes even wider.

  “Planer,” said Nora. “Can you trace this call? I ran to this house but these guys aren’t that far off—there’s, like, this compound, barns and stuff—They took our phones, our badges, guns.… Tell Schacht we need like … SWAT teams and … fighter jets.”

  “We’re tracing you now, Nora. Don’t hang up. Stay where you are. We’ll send as many people as we can.”

  Nora held the girl’s gaze. “Okay? Is that okay? Don’t hang up, okay?”

  The girl nodded, mesmerized.

  “I’m gonna just sit down a minute.” She slid down the door frame and sat on the wide slats of the deck.

  The girl set the rifle on the floor and crouched down. She spoke to Nora through the opening she’d made with the door. “You … you, um, want a glass of water or anything?”

  Nora turned her head to look at the girl. “I would sell my soul for a bathroom,” she said.

  * * *

  The girl’s name was Brianna Ellis, and she was sixteen. Nora had never felt more gratitude toward another human being than she did at the moment that Brianna pulled open the sliding door and ushered her into her home. The girl even disappeared upstairs for a moment and returned with a Taylor Swift T-shirt.

  “Really?” Nora asked.

  Brianna shrugged. “I used to love her, but I fucking hate her now.”

  Nora nodded. “It happens.”

  But as she emerged from the bathroom, face washed, chest emblazoned with the word “Red,” she realized she had probably endangered Brianna more than anyone ever had. I should have pushed that ATV into the lake, she thought.

  Then again, a wall’s a wall. Any fool would have figured out where she’d gone.

  “Brianna,” she said, accepting from her a glass of water. “There are some guys after me.”

  The girl nodded, her green eyes held a knowing look. “You can call me Bree. And you pretty much just led them here.”

  “Do you have a car?”

  “Me personally? Not for another two months. It sucks so bad.…”

  “No, I mean, is there a car here we can take? We need to leave.”

  “Oh. No. My mom’s working nightshift. Dad’s at bowling.”

  “Text them,” Nora said.

  “Oh, believe me, I already did. But they just never pay attention to their phones…” she griped. “Why even have a phone?”

  “Call her actual work. Call the bowling alley.”

  “Call?” Bree looked disconcerted.

  “Yes, the bowling alley. Tell them to tell your dad to come home right away and get you.”

  Bree looked at her askance. Then she shrugged, began Googling the number. “It’s all the way in Erie though.”

  “Oh, for…” Nora spluttered. “Neighbors?”

  “What about them?”

  “How close? I didn’t see any other houses or lights around.”

  Bree shook her head. “Well, it’s not like walkable or anything. Well, I mean, it is for some people. But I’m not a big walker … and it’s totally dark.…”

  Nora felt trapped all over again, then remembered the rifle she’d left leaning on the railing outside. She slipped out to get it, listening intently as she did for the sound of ATVs. Everything was, for the moment, quiet except for the sound of breaking waves. She locked the sliding glass door behind her.

  “Nice AR-15,” Bree observed, twisting a braid around her index finger. “Yours or theirs?”

  “I took it from…” Her voice trailed off, and she saw that Bree knew instantly she had had to kill for that rifle.

  “You okay?” Bree asked softly.

  Nora nodded.

  “How many are you expecting?”

  “Hmm?” Nora asked, trying to gauge how many rounds were left in the cartridge.

  “How many bad guys are about to come over the bluff?”

  Nora blinked. “I’m not sure, Bree.”

  “You need more ammo?” she asked. “You look like you need more ammo.”

  “You just happen to have ammo for a Bushmaster? Just … sitting around?”

  “Not sitting around. In the den. Come on.” Bree headed into a thickly carpeted den.

  Nora, casting a worried glance at the bluff, followed.

  A gun rack occupied one wall of the wood-paneled den. On it, from smallest to heftiest, were a dozen rifles.

  “Thirty round capacity, I’m guessing,” Bree said, assessing the weapon.

  Nora watched, feeling appalled and appreciative simultaneously.

  Bree yanked open a drawer to display tidily arranged boxes of ammunition for the various guns in the room. Nora noted that there was a rifle quite similar to the one she held; Bree pressed a hefty box into her hand, which Nora accepted. There was also a gap where Bree had pulled down the Luger she’d walked into the living room with when Nora first appeared.

  Nora studied the guns and the ammunition displayed in front of her. She could not help but ask, “Do you have any handguns?”

  Bree tugged at another drawer and showed her two different handguns lying prone in form-hugging Styrofoam insets. Nora seized the Glock with a sigh of relief, checking that its cartridge was full.

  “Okay,” she was saying. “This is great. Now, look, Bree, you need to…”

  But the girl was pocketing several rounds, apparently for the Luger.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Helping,” she answered, as she walked back into the living room to load up.

  Nora flustered, followed her. “Look, we need to get these lights off, Bree, and then we should talk.”

  The girl complied. Then, before Nora could direct her to go into her room, she plopped herself down on the floor, rifle on her lap, and began tapping on the screen of her phone.

  “Wait, you left the line open for Anna to track us, right?”

  “Of course—I was just about to Instagram this though—do you care?” she said.

  Nora wasn’t sure she’d heard her. “Sorry?”

  “Instagram us, you know, hanging out with our guns for the shootout. Selfie? I’ll use the flash. Real quick.”

  Nora stared at her. “Bree. Some really bad guys may be coming up your beach stairs, like right now. I didn’t invite you to a shootout. Just, if you could lock yourself in your room with your weapon, I’d feel better. I can handle things down here.”

  “I’ve gotten a hunting rifle every year for Christmas since I was twelve,” Bree said. “I can help you.”

  Nora struggled to recalibrate what she knew about white people and Christmas celebrations. “Charming. Look, I believe you. Now go to your room.”

  “You’re going to regret it.…”

  “Why’s that?” Nora, patience exhausted, demanded.

  “Because they have more guns than you do,” she said, nodding toward the lawn. “Here they come.”

  Nora looked at her wildly. “Give me that phone.”

  Bree passed it to her.

  Nora picked up the Kevlar vest from the couch where she’d tossed it after changing into the Taylor Swift shirt. She walked over to Bree and, over her huffing protests, forcibly tucked her arm
s through the arm-holes, buckling it up for her. “Get to your room,” Nora hissed, putting on the scariest expression she could muster. She was relieved that Bree gave her a fierce frown in return but whirled and began ascending the stairs.

  “Anna,” Nora whispered urgently. “Anna, six armed men just walked over the bluff.”

  “We’re in the car, Nora,” came Anna’s response. “But we’re still about fifteen, twenty minutes away. Do you have to engage with them?”

  “God, I hope not. There’s a teen in the house.”

  “Get her out of there, Nora. It’d be better to take a car and go.”

  “There’s no car. No neighbors. Nothing but grapevines and … white power.”

  “Get her out of there, keep your vest on. CIRG has sent one of the SWAT teams. We’ll be there as fast as we can. Keep the line open.”

  * * *

  A plump, silvery moon illuminated the lawn in a way Nora hadn’t expected; she couldn’t decide if the added light would work in her favor or not. As soon as the figures hit the Ellises’ lawn, they split up to encircle the house. Nora didn’t know which one of them to track. She crouched by the couch, instructing herself to breathe in and out. Her fingers closed and opened around the handle of the Glock. She toted the Adaptive Combat Rifle over her shoulder, its magazine filled with thirty fresh rounds. Six people. Thirty rounds. She could miss four times on each.

  Stop trying to do math, she whispered.

  Anyway, her chances were better with the Glock. She had far more training with that.

  She watched as one of the figures crouched low and mounted the three steps that led up to the deck. It was a woman. Her ponytail swung like a pendulum as she tugged at the sliding glass door, attempting to open it, then stood and took aim at the lock with her rifle.

  Nora stared, still disbelieving what she was seeing. Even as she reluctantly aimed her Glock at the woman’s chest, she heard a crash and knew that the front door had been kicked in. Nora prioritized quickly, firing three bullets through the glass at the woman on the deck and then leaping over the back of the couch.

  There were three of them. Nora was suddenly hyper-aware of time and motion. In the darkened room she could not see their faces, was only vaguely aware of their stances, the way their bodies curved around the rifles they carried, and the way they shouted at each other. Their words ran together and Nora could not divine them. She was suddenly beyond words; there was no way to contain in language the fear she felt or the level of overwhelming panic.

  Sometimes you just go …

  She was kneeling. She depressed the trigger on the Glock over and over, moving the gun’s barrel from one dark form to the other. Exposing her position drew their fire immediately and so she crouched, hoping she hit something, anything, and began firing up from the floor.

  The angle proved effective for at least one, for she heard a shouted command interrupted by her last bullet.

  Get out of there. Lead them away from Bree.…

  She hurtled across the living room floor, praying her earlier shots had met their mark. She shouted incoherently as she ran, hoping to draw their attention, hoping to pull the remaining two out of the house and into the woods. She shouldered the shattered sliding door, pushing the rest of the glass out of it, then jumped over the body of the first militiawoman.

  She hadn’t anticipated that one of them was crouching in wait for her in the shadow of the deck. As she ran down the steps from the deck, he tackled her with an animal grunt. Both of them went sprawling on the slick grass of the front lawn. Nora fought to find a way out from under him, but encountered only a thicket of arms and legs.

  “Not so fast, bitch,” he hissed. He yanked the rifle from her hands and tossed it aside as he stood.

  He grabbed her by her chignon and dragged her upwards until she was on her knees. His breaths were coming hard and fast, and Nora felt his knuckles grazing her neck. The skin was rough and hard. He pressed the tip of his rifle against her right temple.

  Nora, panting already, took a deep, gasping breath, a breath that encompassed sky and lake and trees and stars.

  She squeezed her eyes closed.

  But the crack that came seemed to emanate from well behind her. Somehow it was the gunman who crumpled onto the lawn, and not Nora herself.

  Nora whirled to see Bree holding up her rifle from the second-story window of her bedroom. “Told you you needed help!” she shouted.

  Nora shook her head in disbelief as she let out a sigh of relief. She wanted to shout something up to Bree but found no words. Instead, she patted her own face and head, making sure she was still alive, still whole. She wanted to crush the girl to her in a hug or break into some sort of dance.

  But she realized quickly there was one man left. She twisted left and right, scanning the moonlit lawn for movement. The sound of the waves was audible again, beating steadily against the rocky beach below, matching the sound of her own breathing. She sprang up to search for the rifle that had been tossed aside.

  A smashing sound shattered the stillness.

  Nora knew instantly that exactly what she had feared had happened. Bree’s scream confirmed this, although the girl seemed to have fired off a shot; an identical crack to the one that had felled Nora’s attacker shook the night. This was followed by more screaming.

  Nora raced back into the living room, leaping over the prone forms in her path, and she bolted up the stairs, taking them three at a time. The landing at the top of the stairs revealed a hallway, but finding Bree’s room was no mystery. A figure in camouflage pants and a black T-shirt had pinned Bree’s arm behind her and had pushed her against the wall.

  Nora hesitated, cursing herself for not having yanked a rifle off one of those lying dead in the living room. But she did not hesitate for long. She pounced, wrapping her right arm around the man’s neck and grasping her own wrist hard with her left hand. She pulled backwards with all her might, squeezing with everything she had; her left wrist, not unscathed from the fall in the basement, launched daggers of pain that emanated throughout her entire body.

  His hands went from pinning Bree to groping at Nora’s arm which was vise-like but weakening fast. Bree, now released, reeled and fell onto her twin bed as she tried to get her bearings. Nora saw she was looking for her rifle which was nowhere in sight.

  “Just run!” Nora gasped at her, but the girl could not get by them as the man staggered from side to side, Nora clinging to him.

  She felt her arm beginning to give way and tried to redouble her efforts, but found to her horror that he was overcoming her.

  She knew if she let him pull her off that he would throw her immediately. So she quickly yanked her arms away and slid down his back into a low crouch. As he whirled to face her she punched as hard as could at his groin, then whipped her right hand back, fingers arched to expose the palm. As he doubled over, she shoved the base of her palm upward with all of her might, catching the bottom of his nose and propelling it up into his skull.

  The bones shattered, and blood began spurting out of his nose. Bree darted away, but could not escape a spattering of blood. The man fell facefirst onto her bed, gushing blood onto a comforter emblazoned with neon peace signs.

  Nora and Bree both sank to the floor, looking at each other, chests heaving.

  “Is he dead?” Bree asked.

  “Maybe,” Nora answered. She looked around for his gun.

  Bree saw her. “I shot it out of his hand. Didn’t mean to, actually—meant to kill the fuck. But I was just … surprised to have someone kicking in my door. It was new. And he was very close. It happened very fast.”

  Surprised, Nora looked at the part of the wall where the impact from the man’s rifle had smashed a hole in the drywall. The weapon lay warped on her fuzzy pink carpeting; it had singed some of the pile around it. Nora tilted her head, getting a better glimpse of the man’s right arm, and found that it had a huge burn mark on it. “You did great, Bree. You did so great. Any other kid would have
freaked out.”

  “You saved me,” the girl said.

  “You saved me,” Nora said.

  Bree grinned at her. “We’re fucking amazing.”

  Nora laughed. “Yes we are.”

  Bree looked from Nora to the man sprawled on her bed. “So now can I Instagram it?”

  The man groaned and Nora sprang up from the floor. “I need … well, do you have cable ties?” She so wanted to tie his hands as hers had been for hours.

  Bree considered this. “Nah. What about my bathrobe belt?”

  Nora sighed. “Is it pink?”

  “What do I look like?” She went to the closet and extracted a turquoise, leopard-print robe with a matching belt. “Pink,” she scoffed.

  As Nora tied the man’s hands tightly behind him, they heard several car doors slamming. “And there’s my team.” Nora patted along the length of the man’s body, making sure she hadn’t missed any weapons. She winked at Bree. “These guys are only, what? How late are they?”

  “Like, a million hours late.”

  “Yes,” Nora agreed. “A million hours late. Let’s go.” She draped her arm around Bree’s shoulders and gave her a quick squeeze, before releasing her to pass through her door. “We trashed your room, Bree.”

  The girl twisted a braid around her index finger and said, “It was a little trashed before. I’m not gonna lie to you.”

  Anna was the first one through the doorway, skirting the door that hung now from only one hinge, her gun at the ready.

  Bree flicked the light switch as she began descending the stairs, bathing the foyer in light, and Anna turned quickly, then just as quickly lowered her gun when she saw them, exhaling with relief. “I didn’t know what to expect,” she said.

  “I hope you expected dead bodies,” Nora answered. “Because I have no clue what to do with all these.”

  Anna followed her gesture to take in the living room. She let out a small gasp despite herself. Agents Ford and Chidambaram had stepped in and were looking about.

  Schacht followed. “Any risk that there are more coming?” he asked immediately.

  Nora nodded. “Yes, there’s definitely a risk of that. These came up from the bluff there.” She pointed beyond the living room to the lawn and beach beyond.