I slowed my climb and shot the male thrall. The bullet caught him in the shoulder, lifted him off his feet, and twisting him in the air deposited him face down in a pile of dried leaves. The woman thrall leapt as I fired at the male thrall covering at least ten feet with her one bound and jerked my mother off her feet by the hair dangling behind her. My mother screamed weakly as she tumbled onto her back. The thrall dropped down onto its knees over my mother, its nostrils flaring, and a gurgle of pleasure rattling around in its throat in place of its voice. Its hands shimmered with strands of her silver hair. The sight overwhelmed me, and I charged half-sliding down the slope bellowing. The gun in my hand was forgotten as the thrall bared its teeth and bent its face towards my mother’s squirming neck. She had her feet up under its stomach and pushed with all her might, but the thrall didn’t budge. It had one hand flat against her forehead pinning her head back and the other pushed her shoulder down into the dirt. I saw a thin line of blood trickle across the tautly stretched skin of my mother’s neck before I kicked the thrall. I caught it under the chin with my boot. The impact jarred my leg and almost knocked me to the ground as the thrall’s head snapped back. Suddenly my ears began to ring, and the thrall fell over with a hole in its throat spouting dark blood. I scooped my mother up and ran up the holler’s side towards my brother was holstering his gun. “The rest are coming,” he hissed and then dashed up the slope between clusters of rhododendrons. From behind us I heard a male’s voice utter a high-pitched sneering laugh. Grunts followed and then the sharp snap of a branch from where the thralls had fallen, but I did not look back as I scrambled up the hillside on all fours.
That was the worst time that I had ever been hunted. I ran up and down hillsides and splashed through cold streams in an endless succession. The thralls came on despite our attempts to hide our scent in the streams. I shot a thrall that almost caught up to me on a steep hill, slinging my mother over my shoulder like a sack so that I could draw and fire. I began to worry that I’d never get a chance to reload my clip before it emptied. Benjamin was impatient for me to hurry on and he ran farther and farther ahead. A burning sensation crept down my back and stomach from my burden, and my legs grew leaden. Each step was driven by fear alone. When my mother didn’t sleep, she muttered incoherently in little spastic groans. Her body raged as hotly as a typhoid infested jungle before falling into a glacial cool and then repeating the cycle.
A heavy downpour caught us on the morning of the third day of our flight. I wrapped my mother in a plastic parka and continued trudging slowly over muddy ground that was crisscrossed with streams of water running downhill. The water dripped off my hat, my nose and my chin and rolled down my face but I embraced it even as it soaked through my clothing. Our scent and our tracks were being washed away. After two hours of trudging through the rain it turned into drizzle and then was soon burned away by the bright sun of a clear day.
I caught up to my brother again as he lay on a muddy riverbank soaking up the last rays of the setting sun like a snake that’s just shed its skin. The swollen river’s murky waters swirled and gurgled but he still heard my approach. I carried our mother slung over one shoulder. Our breathing had merged into a mangled mix of heaves and sickly groans accentuated with the irregular pace of my stagger. He did not look up at us. I resisted the urge to let my mother drop to the ground and then collapse beside her in a heap and instead laid her down gently, cradling her head as it fell limply into the sand. Her eyes were now only narrow bloodshot slits in her leathery face and her lips were curled into a mad lopsided smile. I went down to the roiled water
