Caleb

You get to thinkin' when you think you’re gonna die.

Free falling down through the floorboards, I kept having this thought.

I had this idea that maybe, at the end of things, if this fall happened to split me open, whoever found me would see that on the inside I wasn’t like any of my brothers. Sure, all the blood and everything would be the same, but my head and heart wouldn’t.

Maybe it’d turn out that I'd been right my whole life thinking and feeling different than my family, ‘cause I really was different. I wasn't as messed up or crazy as they said I was, just running by a different set of rules, my rules, and nothing was wrong with that.

My Mom told me growing up that the most important thing to a young man coming into his own is to know that he's not broken. I believed in that almost as much as I did her. After she died, I banked on the bad, put my money on things always going wrong. After tonight, that may be all I’ll ever believe in—things going from bad to worse, and from worse to unthinkable.

Everything hurt. Everything, and the hollow quiet I'd fallen into hung heavier than the diseased smell of dead things in the air. I shut my eyes and opened them over and over again hoping for a change, but there was nothing to see, nothing but darkness.

Something soft moved around in the rotten hay bail under my back. Didn't feel like a body but lots of little ones scrambling for their lives. They weren't too different than I was, slipping through the cracks blind and afraid of everything. I hoped to God rats were the only things moving around in the dark.

I slid my hands over the hay trembling all the while, waiting to find another body somewhere around me. I sat up, a little bit too quickly, forgetting how badly Liam took his fists to me earlier. Funny how pain starts to feel like nothing when you've got bigger things to worry about.

The guys up stairs were still looking for us. Every other second, four or five footsteps would clomp against the wood floor overhead. We must've fallen a good ways down ‘cause even the cops sounded far away. Not even a flashlight could shine into this place. I needed to stop thinking and start moving before the suits found their way down to where I was.

Shit, I didn't even know where Hailey’d ended up or if she'd still be breathing when I found her.

I got to my knees and grazed my hands overtop of the hay all frantic, like I'd lost something important. The way things were in my house growing up, I fought for every damn thing I owned. Liam ended up taking most of what I had away, just ‘cause he could.

He did a lot of things just ‘cause he could. He only ever grew into bullying, everything else was weak to him. Honest to God, he scared the hell outta me, but the way things were now I'd break Liam’s neck if he came between me and anything else I cared about. Didn’t matter if it killed me, as long as he ended up in his place.

I kept thinking about Marcus, hoping he came out of fighting with Liam alive. Liam respected him too much to hurt him like he did me. Marcus would go with the cops if they asked him, so I trusted he’d be okay despite how bad things were.

Liam would go down swinging, and if he’d ended up shot dead I’d understand, but I couldn’t understand why Cillian had to take the fall out of the four of us. I would’ve taken his place if I could’ve, but the gunfire happened too fast for anyone to make sense of anything. Wrong place, wrong time was all it was, at least that’s what I wanted to believe.

A cold quiet slithered around my legs and crawled up my spine. I choked up just thinking about how much Cillian suffered before he died. No man should lose his life like that. I don’t even know how my brother died, and once the cops take him I never will. I jabbed my fist into the bad side of my ribs, and a terribly familiar pain came roaring back before I got to thinking too much about Cillian. Just shut up and keep moving, Caleb, stop thinking and keep moving.

I went back to digging through the hay, calling out for Hailey, hoping no one else would hear me. I hardly recognized my own voice it sounded so broken. I started feeling small again, weaker and slower than I had any other day in my life.

Stumbling around blindly in the dark, without anything but pain to think about, I didn’t know how much longer I could keep going, but I wanted to get her home. Giving up and letting myself die here or ending up in prison were the only options I had left aside from that.

Can you keep a promise, if the person you made it to dies? I couldn’t get the sight of her out of my head, not from the first time I saw her or the last. I’d never seen her so scared for her life. I’d never wanted to.

She’d turned whiter than paste and fell right out of my sight, like a ghost. What if that was all she was to me now? I held my breath every time I let my fingers graze across the rotten damp floor, hoping I wouldn’t find hers cold and lifeless somewhere in the black.

Then I heard her.

Softer than a whisper at first, but I heard her crying no more than a few feet away from me. I never thought I’d find any comfort in hearing a girl cry until then. I followed the sound until my hands found their way to hers. She wrapped her willowy arms around me the second she could. I pulled her up into my lap, like she was a broken bird, held her there for a little while, and let her cry.

No one should cry the way she did in front of me, with so much hurt behind the tears, you can feel all of it, but can’t do much to take it away.Maybe I was a little hasty to think this, but for a couple of minutes at least, the same blind trust she gave me when I met her at the train station, came back.

I lied to myself for even thinking that we could stay the way we were, that I could hold out on telling her the truth about how things ended up like this. Letting her stay in the dark was safer than telling her the truth, but, I was out of time and options, and so was she.

“You okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice sounding raspier than a smoker’s. I cupped the side of her face in my hand to keep her calm. She started a bit, but eased up once she knew I meant no harm.

“That makes two of us. You’ll be alright, though. Liam and the cops are a good eight feet above us, it’ll be a minute before anybody finds us down here.”

She tensed up in her shoulders, and didn’t have to say anything for me to know what she was afraid of.

“He’s dead—Liam’s dead isn’t he? The police took care of it didn’t they? He could’ve killed me. You saw it right? They all saw it. They had to have seen it. They should’ve killed him.”

“I don’t think they’re planning to, Hailey.”

She didn’t understand. Who could expect her to? She thought the dirty cops behind the badges were superheroes, the good guys who’d showed up just in time, guns blazing, to take her home. Would’ve made a good headline, but headlines are never the truth. Not a single cop in there stopped Liam from taking that shot.

As far as they were concerned, better him take out their target than a badge. Good cops don’t shoot the doors off a place with a hostage inside. I was the only person in this house who’d take a bullet for her. Those guys were only looking for a clean shot and a quiet kill. The girl didn’t even know she had a price on her head, and they would’ve put her six feet under before she could ask why.

“My Dad’s a senator, Caleb. He’s got friends in the bureau, the CIA, the police. They’d kill anyone he asked them to.”

“Even you.”

She slapped my hand away and pulled back from me like I knew she would. There wasn’t any right way to do this, except to tell her straight. I didn’t have to see her face to know how she was looking at me.

“What did you say?”

She’d found her voice again, and it slipped out from her lips sharper than barbed wire.

“Before you go off on me, just try to listen for a minute, things are messier than you think—“

“Why would I listen to you? Of all people in the world to trust do you really think I’m gonna sit here and take notes on your little conspiracy theory? All I have to do is scream and my dad’s guys will be down here so fast you won’t even have a chance to run.”

“Go right ahead. That’ll make two of us.”

I slid back against the nearest wall and put a little distance between me and her. The last time I let her get too close I ended up with broken bones, and wasn’t keen on that happening again. She sucked in a mouthful of dead air and blasted it out through her nostrils. For a girl with a grazed gunshot wound she could talk. Chances are she hadn’t even noticed the pain yet. Anger makes you numb, but not bulletproof.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to get out of trying to talk me out of a rescue, at this point, but I’m going home. I’ll figure a way back upstairs by myself. I’m not your family, Caleb. You can’t just say crazy shit and expect me to rally behind you without thinking.”

She went too far with that. Had this conversation been between guys I would’ve laid her out for trash talking the way she was.

“You don’t know a goddamn thing about my family.”

“And you don’t know my Dad.”

She sounded like an angry six-year-old. I had to grind my teeth to keep from losing it all together.

“Really? Did Mitch tell you we know each other? Liam knows him even better than I do. ”

By some miracle, Hailey stopped talking for a full minute after I said that. She scrambled to her feet and scuffled back into the opposite wall. The fluorescent lights flickered on about two feet above where she was standing. Lights are fine if you want them turned on, but given how she was looking at me, I realized how much I preferred the dark.

“Lying to me, on top of kidnapping, assaulting, and molesting me—“

“Think what you want, Hailey.”

“Oh believe me, I do. You’re going to jail. You’d be better off turning yourself in before you end up dead.”

I thought my ears would bleed if she kept carrying on the way she was. God, she could talk, and she’d gab her way right into the grave if she didn’t shut up and listen.

“Are you gonna hear me out or should I just let you go on believing that your Dad didn’t set you up and sell your life to Liam and the cops for a couple grand?”

I’d never seen Hailey so still. She struggled to swallow what I’d said, eyes darting all over the place until she focused back on me. For a while, I waited for her to say something, to snap back at me like she always does when she thinks I’m wrong, but it looked like she knew I wasn’t.

The truth of it all is, she didn’t really have a reason to defend her father. He hadn’t done a goddamn thing for her since I stole her out of that train station, but her kidnapping story would win him an election. Her life wasn’t worth more than a goddamn seat to him, but it meant something to me.

She dropped her gaze down to her feet and started crying again. She’s too pretty of a girl to cry that much. I regretted opening my mouth at all, but if I hadn’t she’d run right back into the line of fire where Liam would be the least of her problems.

“Caleb, if this is your way of trying to get me to follow you or give you whatever it is you’re after, just stop. Your stronger than I am, I know that. I can’t outrun you. You’ve proved your point. But don’t say things like that to me, unless you have a real reason to.”

Her lips trembled at the corners while she waited for me to answer. I lost my nerve looking into those big brown eyes of hers. Hailey’s father was gonna break her heart, the worst thing about it was that she had to hear it from me. The old bastard probably never even set foot outside of D.C. and left his daughter for dead while she waited on him to show.

“I don’t know too much more than I already said but a couple months back, Liam was taking the bus up to D.C. to find work. There’s nothing around here these days, and he’d come home drunk every night he didn’t find a job.He met Mitch out drinking and your dad offered to pay him to do a job under the table. I didn’t know shit about anything at the time, just that he’d talked to some rich guy who was gonna help pay off some debt we’d gotten into.”

Hailey leaned back against the wall and wouldn’t look at anything else but her fingers. She’d locked all ten of them together so tight all the color drained out of her hands. The quiet bothered me the most. At least when she’s talking I know she’s alright.

“He didn’t tell me who you were, just what you looked like, and where to find you the morning you left for Charlottesville. When you said you shot him, I thought you had guts ‘cause as soon as I saw his last name on the back of your sweatshirt, I knew what kind of a scumbag he was to do something like this to his own daughter.”

“So why help him at all? For money, Caleb?”

I hated the way that sounded when she said it, probably because at one time it was the truth.

“We needed it, Hailey. Your Dad said he’d pay us if we helped him scare you out of leaving home or something crazy like that. I didn’t know he had political shit on the line or that he’d double cross all of us for it.”

“But you agreed to do it away.”

“My family was in bad shape, Hailey. Shit, we still are. But at the time I would’ve done anything to get us out of it.Getting paid to take the fall for a fake kidnapping, to walk away with enough money to survive, and never see a day in jail was worth it to me. I didn’t think— ”

“No, you didn’t.”

I shut up pretty quick after that. Hailey’s stare was colder than the concrete, and she didn’t back off.I knew that look.My Dad used to look at me like that, like I was the biggest screw up in the world, and every minute I lived and breathed in his house made him regret having a fourth son. I slicked my hands through my hair and tried to think of something better to say, but I wasn’t smart enough to lie. I never have been.

A dust cloud thick enough to dim the lights rained down from the ceiling all of a sudden. The footsteps upstairs shifted direction to the right of where we were standing—bad news for us, if we didn’t figure a way to the outside quick.

“We gotta move.”

I kicked my legs against the concrete, got up, and grabbed Hailey before she could say anything else. An explosion rattled through the house, and smoky light poured in just over of the place where I’d landed in the hay.

One rope after the other dropped down through the bigger hole in the ceiling the police blasted open, and four guys started their way down. I didn’t stick around long enough to see the laces on their combat boots. We should’ve been halfway out of the tunnel by now, but I just couldn’t keep my goddamn mouth shut.

We didn’t get too far before lasers from the guns down the hallway found their way to us. I pushed Hailey against the wall and covered her body so the red lights only fell on me. I thought about staying put, but if I gave in at this point, we’d only be waiting for the cops to murder the both of us and leave our bodies for the rats. All the adrenaline burning through my bloodstream charred out the fear, and I made a decision, the only decision—to keep running.

We took off, her hand in mine, while some rookie cop fired out a few warning shots to scare us from behind. I didn’t stop or think about stopping, and as the two of us sprinted down a half lit corridor, Hailey didn’t let go of me. She could’ve dug her heels into the ground, cut her losses and headed back to the cops that were on payroll to double-cross her, but she followed my lead.

Something changed in me because of that.

Couldn’t tell you what it was, but I was sure of the feeling. Maybe I was sure of her, or maybe I was jumping the gun looking for somebody to fill in all the places I felt lonely. Whatever it was, it had me thinking; that maybe, just maybe, I could be something better than bad, or even turn out better than broken.

But even the best men aren’t bulletproof, and from the looks of the brand new bloodstain streaming down the side of my t-shirt, neither was I.

Just keep movin’, Caleb, keep movin’.