Winston stopped several feet away, leveled the shotgun on Rufus and Maxine, and tossed the rope at their feet.
“What’s your name, cutie?” he asked Maxine.
“Please,” Rufus said, still gasping for air, a tremor moving through his lower lip. “You guys can clearly do whatever you want. We’re at your mercy. I recognize that. And I am begging you to let us go. You have that power.”
Winston swept his long, greasy hair back behind his shoulders.
“But we been watching you all day, laying up there in the bushes behind the dunes. If you’d gone home with everyone else, our paths would never have crossed. But you didn’t go home like everyone else. You stayed. So you know what I think that means?”
“What?”
With the tip of the shotgun’s barrel, Winston slid the shawl off Maxine’s shoulder, and smiled at the yellow bikini underneath, at her washboard stomach.
“That this is fate. Now what’s your name, bitch? Don’t make me ask again.”
“Maxine,” she said. “Please don’t hurt my children.”
“Maxine, I want you to take that rope and tie your husband up. I’m gonna check when you’re done, and if it ain’t picture perfect and tight as fuck, there’s gonna be hell to pay. Even more than what’s already on the schedule.”
Luther watched his mother lift the rope.
Crying and trembling, she wrapped it around Rufus’s waist and started to bind his wrists together.
“It’s gonna be okay, Max,” he said. “Don’t cry. We’ll get through this.”
Winston tugged a pocket knife out of his pants and cut a ten-foot length of rope which he tossed to Ben.
“Tie them.”
With his knife, he motioned to Luther and Katie.
Ben lumbered over to the rope and snatched it up. When he smiled at Luther, there was still blood stuck between his teeth.
Luther watching, a sinking jolt of terror flooding through him.
A siren wailing between his eyes.
Knowing on some base level what he could not allow to happen.
The man was three steps away when Luther jumped to his feet and took off toward the trees at a dead sprint, his bare feet kicking bursts of sand in his wake, the men shouting as he scrambled up the dunes, Winston screaming at Ben to catch the little fucker.
Luther glanced back, saw Ben galloping toward him, Katie crying, his parents screaming at him to run, don’t stop, while Winston held them at bay with the shotgun.
Luther tore down the island-side of the dune and ran for the line of trees in the distance.
He could see the lighthouse a mile away in the village of Ocracoke , its beacon shining just above the treetops.
Another glance back.
Ben ten steps behind.
A sharp burn spread down out of Luther’s stomach and into his legs.
Lungs on fire.
He couldn’t keep running like this.
He punched through the treeline into a wood of live oaks, roots and thorns ripping at the soles of his feet, branches tearing at his bare arms and chest.
Much darker here in the trees with the starlight obscured, and Luther could only make out the profile of Ben pushing after him through the shrubs.
The boy veered off the straight trajectory he’d been running and shot up the low-hanging branches of a live oak.
Ten feet off the ground.
Panting.
His feet eviscerated.
For thirty seconds, he couldn’t hear a thing over the pounding of his heart and the desperate intake of oxygen.
When he finally caught his breath, he strained to hear the sound of Ben’s footsteps.
Sweat trickled down the bridge of his nose, burning his eyes.
He clung to a fat, knobby branch with one arm and plucked a series of thorns out of the back of his leg with the other.
There it was—forty, maybe fifty feet away—brittle leaves crunching under footsteps.
Winston yelled something from the beach.
Ben was moving toward Luther’s tree now—he could hear the man forcing his way through bushes, the occasional crack of a branch breaking.
“Boy!” he yelled. “I don’t hear your footsteps anymore. You ain’t that fast, which means you’re somewhere close by, hiding behind some tree, or in some goddamn bush.”
Luther spotted him—twenty-five, thirty feet away—standing absolutely still. A bit of moonlight had wandered in through the branches and it lit Ben’s face with a pale and ghostly glow.
“I’m gonna make you a deal right now, little man. You come out from wherever you’re hiding, I won’t hurt your sister.”
Luther squeezed his eyes shut with such a fierce intensity the tears could only leak out.
“But let me tell you what I’m going to do if you ain’t standing in front of me in the next thirty seconds. I’m gonna borrow Winston’s knife—you saw it right?—and go to work on her pretty little face. You’ll hear her screams all the way from the beach.”
Ben started walking again.
The sweat on Luther’s hands made it almost impossible to grip the bark, and he had to squeeze his thighs against the steep branch to keep from sliding.
“You’re a little chickenshit, ain’t you? Run off and hide to let your family suffer alone.”
Ben stepped directly under Luther’s branch and stopped.
Luther’s chest pounded against the bark, his muscles cramping, tears and sweat stinging in his eyes.
“Ten seconds,” Ben said. “Then I’m walking back out onto the beach. Come out right now like a good little boy, I’ll spare your sister. Won’t make no other promises about nothing else, but she’ll live. I am a bad, bad man, but I ain’t no liar.”
A mosquito wailed into Luther’s ear.
He didn’t flinch.
Let it land just inside the canal. There was a brief, cutting itch, and then numbness.
“All right,” Ben said. “You’re making this decision, little man. Nobody but you. Hope it haunts you the rest of your days. You change your mind, you know where to find me. Just follow the screams.”
Ben turned and started back through the trees.
Luther craned his neck to watch him go, the man passing in and out of patches of moon-and starlight until he reached the treeline and vanished.
For a long time, Luther clung to the branch and cried.
Mosquitoes swarmed him.
He asked God to stop this from happening.
Kept shutting his eyes and opening them again, telling himself every time that it was only a nightmare. That he’d wake up in his bed on the third floor of their stone house on the sound and none of this would be real. He’d walk down the hallway into Katie’s room, crawl into bed with her and snuggle close until the after-fear was gone.
Five minutes after Ben had left him, it started.
Three voices—his mother crying, his sister screaming, his father begging.
All merging into a cacophony of grief, pain, and terror.
Luther scaled down the tree and ran.
