Chapter 60 - You or Me?
Hanks's ears caught it before anyone else did. Engine noise. More than one vehicle, coming from the direction they'd entered, the ground carrying a faint tremor underneath the sound. Through the trees, headlights blinked in the failing light.
"They called for backup. More coming — move to the pickup! Now!"
"Katjaa's still in there!" Carley's voice broke as she shouted it, though her gun hand didn't stop.
"Cover me." Hanks was already moving toward Lee as he said it.
He broke from behind the tree, came in low along the ground, and threw himself through the RV's rear door.
The inside looked like something had chewed through it. Holes everywhere. The smell of blood hit him before his eyes adjusted.
Katjaa was on the floor in the back passage, lying in a dark pool that had spread wide beneath her. Her eyes had gone unfocused. She was still breathing, but barely.
He looked at the wounds. Chest and abdomen. The exit wound at her back was bad. She had lost too much blood. He took it in without allowing himself to stop on it.
"Stay with me." He got his arms under her and lifted.
He came back out through the door at a run, cutting left and right on instinct as rounds snapped past, and got to the pickup. He laid Katjaa across the back seat and pulled himself into the front.
"Go. Go."
Lee floored it. The tires spun on the loose road surface and caught, and the pickup shot forward. Kenny threw his empty shotgun through the door ahead of himself, climbed in, and he and Carley pressed against Katjaa from either side, hands finding the wounds.
The gang fired a ragged volley at the pickup's rear as it pulled away. Then most of them turned back toward the crashed RV and the supplies scattered around it. The sound of the approaching convoy grew louder behind them.
The pickup drove.
Inside the cab, nobody spoke. The engine was loud. Everyone's breathing was loud.
"Katjaa?" Clementine's voice was very small. "Aunt Katjaa?"
Carley's hands were pressed hard against the wounds. Blood moved through her fingers regardless. It soaked into the seat. It reached Duck's face where he was pressed against his mother and he couldn't understand what he was looking at.
Katjaa's pupils had gone wide and still.
Her body shuddered once. Then her head fell sideways, and whatever had been holding on let go.
Carley made a sound that wasn't a word.
Seconds later, the body moved again. Not a breath. Not a shiver. The fingers curled inward, and a low rattling sound came from the throat.
Hanks saw it in the rearview mirror. He felt something pass through him, cold and certain.
"Stop the car."
Lee hit the brakes. The pickup shuddered to a halt in the middle of the road.
Hanks sat still for a moment. Then he got out, walked around to the rear door, and lifted Katjaa's body in his arms. He carried her to the grass at the edge of the treeline and set her down gently against the base of a tree.
Everyone climbed out.
Carley held Clementine against her shoulder, one hand pressed to the back of the little girl's head, keeping her face turned away. Kenny had Duck locked in both arms, holding him back from his mother, the boy's whole body rigid with fighting it.
Lee turned away and stood with his hands on the truck, staring at the road.
Hanks drew the tactical knife from his thigh.
Duck felt the shift in the air before he understood it. The sound he made was not a child's cry. It was something worse than that.
"No. Mama. No, please."
He struggled against his father's arms, frantic, reaching.
"Dad, let go of me. Stop him. I want my mama. Please."
Kenny held on. He had not stopped shaking since he got out of the truck.
Yesterday she had been fine. Yesterday had been a campfire and roasted venison and her voice telling the kids to eat. Yesterday.
Why. Why.
Hanks looked at Kenny.
"Kenny." He kept his voice quiet. "You, or me?"
Kenny's body jerked as if something had struck him. He stared at the knife. He looked at the shape on the ground that had been his wife and was becoming something else. He looked at his son's face.
His wife. The gentlest person he had known in this world or any version of it before. The mother of his boy.
Leave it to Hanks? Let a near-stranger be the last person to touch her?
Do it himself?
There was no good answer. There was only the choice.
Kenny let out a sound from somewhere deep that went past grief into something without a name. It went louder than Duck's crying and then broke.
He pulled Duck to his chest, pressed one hand over the boy's eyes, and pulled him in hard.
"Don't look, son." His voice was gone, nothing left of it but breath and shaking. "Don't look."
He squeezed his own eyes shut. The tendons in his jaw stood out like rope.
That was his answer.
He could not do it. He could not watch it. He was putting his son's face against his chest and closing his eyes and handing the unbearable thing to Hanks, along with the task of keeping Duck from seeing it, because he could not carry all of it at once and this was the piece he was letting go of.
Hanks understood. He nodded once.
He looked down at her.
"Katjaa." His voice was low. "I'm giving you mercy."
He raised the knife.
"Good night."
He didn't hesitate. The motion was precise and fast, and it was merciful in the only way that word still meant anything.
Everything stopped. The trembling. The sound from the throat. All of it.
The road went quiet except for the wind in the trees.
And Duck, muffled against his father's chest, making the sound of a child whose world has just been reduced to the size of one terrible fact.
Kenny shook and shook. The hardest man in the group, the one who argued and pushed back and never admitted when something was too much. He came apart standing up, teeth clenched down against it, doing nothing to stop the tears cutting through the blood and grime on his face.
When he finally let Duck go, father and son went to her together, half-crawling, and held on.
The crying filled the space around the stopped truck. Carley kept Clementine turned into her shoulder. Lee sat down heavily against the pickup's front tire with his arms on his knees and his eyes on the horizon, watching the last light go out of it.
He thought about his parents. His brother. Whether at the end, in whatever room or street or ditch it had happened in, it had looked anything like this.
Hanks cleaned the blade slowly. He looked at the people around him. At Kenny and Duck bent over Katjaa. At all of it.
He thought about saying something. Comfort felt dishonest. An apology felt like it was for him, not them. An order to move would be true and necessary and completely wrong for this particular moment.
He said nothing.
He stood there with them in the dark and let the grief be what it was.
After a while, his tired voice broke the silence.
"Take all the time you need."
patreon.com/Twilightsky588 - 100 advanced chapters