Come and Get Us by James Patterson & Shan Serafin

Author:James Patterson & Shan Serafin [Patterson, James & Serafin, Shan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B01J24WA5M
Publisher: BookShots
Published: 2016-12-06T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

I probably should’ve been more strategic. I could have waited a moment and at least calculated some defensive geometry. But I jumped up and left, with no plan or preparation. I jumped up and sprinted.

My new friend Clay Hobson had been summoning his extra troops. He’d pinned me down and held me at bay while he gathered his forces. I cursed myself for being so gullible.

But now I was sprinting full speed in the opposite direction. Away from the highway.

The game had changed. The call had changed everything. I had to get to Aaron and Sierra.

Call it willpower. Call it fear. Call it ovaries. The point is I ran so hard that I stopped caring about things like pain and air. My leg muscles were scalding, my lungs were screaming, but I didn’t care. I ignored it.

I came stumbling up the crags, stumbling toward the cave entrance, and nearly collapsed. Only now did I notice that my leg was bleeding. So was my mouth, actually. I’d dry-heaved so hard—gasping for breath, failing to swallow, failing to dampen the palate—that I scorched the back of my throat. I spat blood. I was far from caring.

I was 100 percent preoccupied with the cave I’d finally reached, worried—no, terrified—that I’d be walking into a tomb. They’d spent a night in here and I was ready to find a mortified child huddled over a stiff corpse with a single, diagonal beam of sunlight cracking through the darkness from above, illuminating them like a medieval painting.

And that’s exactly what I saw. Minus the sunbeam. Minus the corpse.

“Mommy!” said Sierra from the far corner of the darkness. She jumped up, dissolving into tears.

We embraced for what must’ve been a three-week hug. She clamped onto my chest and I looked across the cave to find Aaron looking back at me. He’d been asleep until Sierra’s joy had roused him, energized him. I can only imagine the fear they’d felt since I’d left.

As I gathered Sierra in my arms and approached my husband, I could see that his cheerful disposition was a facade. He was in bad shape. His skin was ghostly pale and there was a hollow quality to his eyes. I’d been the one fistfighting all day, but it seemed like he took every one of the blows. He looked a decade older than he did yesterday. The happy man who was in the backseat of the minivan with my daughter, navigating the kangaroo galaxy, was barely in the same cave with us now. He was a stranger.

“M…randa,” he said.

The whole run back I’d been tallying up a million questions for him that, under normal circumstances, I would’ve launched into with guns blazing. As if anything about any of this was normal.

“I’m here for you,” I said to him. No questions. Just love.

“You found…?” he struggled to speak. “You found them?”

It took a moment for me to understand what he meant.

“Yes,” I replied.

“They tried…”

“To kill me? Yes.”

“Then we ha…Then we have some…talking…to do.” Every syllable a struggle.

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