Tim takes a splintered, shallow breath, and then his chest stops moving. The seeping blood slows. His eyes are open and unseeing.
“Wake up. Tim, wake up.” I shake him, but he doesn’t blink or move. “Wake up, Tim.”
“Lydia.” Wes’s arms wrap around my middle, trying to pull me back. Away.
I fight against his hold. “I have to stop the bleeding. I have to stop it. I have to—”
“Shh.” I feel Wes breathe into my hair. “He’s gone. Lydia, he’s gone.”
“No.” I close my eyes. If I keep my eyes closed then it didn’t happen. “This isn’t real; this isn’t real.”
New bullets burst through the woods in a torrent of gunfire. Wes pushes my body down until we’re both hidden behind the fallen tree. I keep my eyes closed so that I won’t have to see Tim lying dead next to me. The bullets seem like they will never end and I know we need to get up and keep moving. I cannot fall apart now. There is no time for grief.
“Let’s go,” I whisper.
There’s a pause in the shooting and Wes pulls me to my feet, keeping me angled away from the log. His hand clutches mine; he signals to Twenty-two and then we are running. I do not look back at the soldiers hunting us, at Tim’s body, bloody and still.
We rush through the trees and the gunfire is everywhere, never stopping. I feel a burning on my arm and know that a bullet has nicked my skin. “We’re not going to make it!” I yell. Wes hears me but doesn’t say anything, just pulls at my arm, speeding up the smallest bit.
They keep coming and coming. I hear a thud and turn to see Twenty-two’s body facedown in the dirt, a dark spot spreading on her back.
“Twenty-two.” I tug at Wes’s arm. He stops, dropping my hand. I start to move toward her, but bullets rain down again, forcing us behind two trees.
“There’s no way to reach her.” His voice is still calm, the same way it was during that car chase so many days ago, and this time I find it comforting. Maybe he thinks we have a chance, however small it is.
“We can’t just leave her here.”
“There’s no choice, Lydia.” His voice is drowned out by the constant shooting. It lights up the woods on their side, and behind the sparks I see the shadows of hundreds of bodies, the long barrels of their rifles.
Twenty-two’s arm trembles on the ground. She’s still alive, but I can picture her bleeding out, her olive skin turning chalky, her small body racking as she struggles for breath. Even if we can get her away from here, she will die just like Tim did. We have no medicine, no ambulance. Maybe she has a better chance with the FBI, who will at least keep her alive so they can interrogate her.
I turn away from her twitching form. The minute there is a pause in the gunfire Wes takes my hand and we are running through the woods again, the bullets flying all around us.
In the space between two rounds of gunfire, I hear it again—the quick rise and fall of cars passing on a highway. I yank on Wes’s arm, changing our direction until we are running toward the sound. He squeezes my hand in his, and then he falters, stumbles, and I turn to see him grab his leg. “Wes!”
“I’m fine.” He says the words through gritted teeth. “It’s just my thigh. I can keep going.”
We are so close to the road, to escape. I tighten my grip on his hand and pull him forward. He is slower, limping, but he doesn’t stop running.
“Just hold on,” I whisper. “We’re almost there.”
We break through the edge of the trees and onto an open stretch of land. Sometime in the past few minutes night has fallen, and the moon is a low ball on the horizon. Ahead of us is the highway, the cars rushing back and forth, their headlights a slash against the black tar.
We are too exposed in this open space, but we do not hesitate, running forward and hunching down to make our bodies small. When we are halfway to the road, the agents emerge from the woods behind us and I glance back, startled by how many there are, hundreds of black uniforms stretching out, their bulletproof vests bulky against their dark silhouettes. “Keep down,” I shout to Wes. He is sweating, the drops beading like dew on his forehead, but he curves his back over, keeping as low as he can with a bullet in his thigh.
We are only a few feet from the road when I feel him jerk forward. This time he clutches his shoulder and falls to his knees.
“Wes. Wes. No.” I kneel beside him in the tall grass. “Get up. You can do this. Get up.”
His hand wraps around my arm, his grip still strong.
“You’ll be okay. Just get up.”
The gunfire stops. I imagine they do not want to hit a civilian car, or maybe they think we are defeated, that we have nowhere left to run.
“Lydia. Go. This is your chance.”
“Not without you.”
He shakes his head, swallows hard against the pain. “We both know I can’t jump on the back of a car right now.”
I look over his bleeding shoulder. The highway is on the grid and the cars fly past at seventy miles an hour, maybe more. If we’re going to make it, we have to be quick and strong and ready to hold on for hours.
“Go,” he repeats. “I’ll be fine.”
“I can’t leave you here.” It was hard enough watching Tim die, abandoning Twenty-two. I cannot lose Wes.
“You have to.”
The soldiers are coming closer, moving quickly, their bodies angled to the side, their guns cocked and pointed at us. Wes abandoned the shotgun after Twenty-two fell. He still has the knife that she found in the barn, but it is no match
