“Miranda!” he roared.
Another game of Marco Polo, hoping I’d bite the worm on the hook. I didn’t. He had his own explosives now. Two sticks from Jed. The one way to extinguish oil fires is to blow them up.
The next derrick on my demolition list was way up the ridge, making for a long sprint along a trench in the hillside. I waited for the right moment, then ran for it.
Crack, crack, crack! Gunshots chased right after me. Clay wasn’t fooling around anymore. He wanted me erased.
I kept going, running and running, eventually and unexpectedly reaching a barbed-wire fence. Was this it? Was this the rally? I could see a number of industrial derricks and a factory. This wasn’t Jedediah’s property anymore. This was the edge of Drake’s northernmost fracking plant.
And now the closest well was a fracking rig. A big, metallic mosquito of human engineering, sticking its snout deep and horizontal into its victim to slurp a mile sideways.
There was indeed a crowd in the distance. The labor strike! My first glimpse of normal people. Maybe a hundred of them.
“Help!” I shouted toward them. “Help!”
But they were too far away to hear me and were all gazing about ninety degrees in another direction, toward the last explosion I made, which was an understandably enticing thing to gaze at.
I’d have to lure them with another boom.
I ran for the closest well. Crack, another bullet ripped through the air, close enough that I actually heard it swish by my head. I arrived at the rig and dove for cover under the web of its piping. I soon had the dynamite sticks nestled in the crook of the main tube.
And that’s when I was hit from behind.
Jed. The butt of his shotgun.
I’d been spared the bullets because he didn’t want to aim toward explosives and high-pressure flammable gas.
But Jed didn’t factor in how hard I’d hit him back. This gal had grown with the fight. Nothing could faze me at this point.
I spun around and rammed him headfirst, nailing him square in the midsection. He was a big guy, but his age had caught up to him. Chugging up the hillside left him vulnerable.
He went down hard and I quickly straddled his oily torso and started punching him with all my might. Over and over. Left, right, left.
Which is when a few members of the crowd emerged over the crest of the hill. And the first thing they saw was me beating up an old, gray-haired man. Which they certainly didn’t let go unchecked.
“Hey, get off him!” said one of the workers.
“Hey, she’s beating on someone!” said another.
Clay arrived just in time to ruin any chance for truth to prevail.
“This is your arsonist!” said Clay, pointing at me.
“Wait,” I protested.
But the crowd was gathering and opinions were forming fast.
“This is the arsonist,” one of the workers shouted back to the others. Someone had keys to the gate in the fence and opened it up right away.
Clay capitalized on the chaos. “She’s got the fuses for the dynamite in her front pocket! Look! And the igniter in her right fist. Look!”
The crowd was looking at me. I was so out of breath I could barely speak.
“That’s not…that’s not true,” I said.
“He’s right,” said a woman with tattooed forearms. “She’s got fuse wire.”
“No, I mean…it’s not true that I’m the…that I’m the…” I couldn’t finish my sentence. I had reached my absolute mental and physical limit.
Clay was in full force, grandstanding to the gathering crowd. “This woman has been trying to start fires all along the canyon. On the day of your rally! You tell me—is that a coincidence?”
More and more people were gathering.
Clay continued. “Your families, your friends, all conveniently clustered in one vulnerable location.”
The crowd was growing hostile. There were awful names being shouted at me. This was their day to vent frustration, and now, thanks to Clay, this was their day to route it toward me.
I tried to step away from the growing circle.
“Not goin’ anywhere, miss,” said a man in a cowboy hat, rifle in hand. Folks in this part of the universe carried guns. Proudly.
“Please,” I implored them. “I need to call an ambulance. My husband needs an ambulance.”
“Stop lying!” said Clay.
“Yeah,” said a worker, joining in the mob mentality. “Stop lying.”
“She’s a radical!” said Clay. “Hired by Drake to sabotage the strike!”
I started to struggle against the grip of the crowd but more and more people were shoving me back to the center. The two fires roared behind me.
After all I’d been through—was this really how I was going to go out?
The chorus of discontented voices grew and grew until someone said, “Kill her.”
And someone else shouted, “No, you kill me first!”
Chapter 29
And that changed everything.
It was a thunderous voice, slightly ragged, but resounding with confidence and conviction that I’ve only heard emanate from one person. My husband.
“Me first!” roared Aaron. “Kill me first!”
The crowd all stopped. Hushed itself. They slowly opened their ranks to let him take center stage. He had Sierra in his arms. Knees buckling as he walked, he’d expended his last breath to walk up the hillside.
“Me…not her,” he said one last time.
He knew what he was doing—the locals reacted instantly.
“Aaron Cooper,” said the woman with the forearm tattoos, as if his name were holy.
“It is him,” said someone else with equal awe. “It is Aaron.”
They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. I couldn’t either. Whatever it was. Him. Their savior. He stood in the middle, commanding all their attention, all their respect.
“This is my wife,” he said. “Her name is Miranda. Today she faced a monster. And that monster…that monster is standing right next to her.”
“Quiet!” shouted Clay. Then he addressed the crowd. “You can’t trust him!”
“Clay and his cronies rammed us off the road,” continued Aaron, pointing at Clay. “Then he tried to kill her. Then, when he knew he couldn’t cover any of it up, he had Jed try to
