“Wait!” Arthur shouted back, shifting his position, wiping his spare hand down the front of his jeans.
“Arthur, now!” Oliver screamed. “Open the door!” “F**k!”
Arthur reached forward, slamming his hand down on the handle and pushing hard.
The door to the RV swung open, the darkness waiting for them there, gaping and black. It must be a rectangle of light, looking from the other side.
Simon raised his knees like he was running, hurrying down the steps, his teeth gritted, eyes wild and afraid and—
Crack.
The mirror shattered.
“F**k!” Arthur screamed as the mirror jumped out of his hands, crashing back against the counter.
“Close the door!” Oliver’s frantic voice filled Red’s ears. “Simon, pull the rope!”
Simon scrabbled with it, the rope almost sliding through his hands. He fell back against the closet and he pulled.
The door slammed shut with a thump, lock clicking into place, sealing them inside once more.
“Holy fuck!” Simon said, sinking to the floor, laughing or crying Red couldn’t quite tell. “We did it.”
Arthur was bent double, breathing hard. His hands were pressed against his thighs, head hanging upside down. Was he all right?
“Who’s got it?” Oliver was standing now. “He shot! Who got the muzzle flash on their phone?”
Red pulled hers inside, slotting the mattress back into position. There was a bead of blood there on the see-through skin of her wrist, where the glass had pierced through. Her very own red dot.
She stopped the recording, phone twittering at her, the same sound from Maddy and Reyna. She navigated to the video file and pressed play.
“Get into—” “—Get into posi—”
“—Get into position,” Oliver’s voice said three times, overlapping.
Reyna’s video was playing half a second before hers, Maddy’s just after.
The sound of Red’s breath from the speaker at the bottom of her phone. Rustling as the image on-screen went from light to pitch-black, inside to out.
“Is every—”
“—Is everyone r—” “—Is everyone ready?”
Red brought the screen closer, studying the pixelated darkness. “N—”
“—NOW—”
“—NOW!”
Red didn’t blink. “Wai—”
“—Wait—”
“—Wait!”
The three layers of Arthur’s voice in a frenetic rush, splicing together. “Arthur—”
“—Arthur, now—”
“—Arthur, now! Open the door!” “Fu—”
“—F**k—”
“—F**k!”
The Arthur from here and now turned; Red felt his eyes on her, but she didn’t look away from the screen because it was coming, it was—
Cr—
—Cra—
—Crack.
A tiny flash of light in all that black as the three shots split the air. But it had only been one, and she had it, right here. Red had it. She paused the video, spooled it back.
“I’ve got it,” she said, looking up at Arthur. His eyes looked drawn, mouth tight. “I’ve got it.” Louder now.
“Let me see.” Oliver rushed over, leaning to watch behind her shoulder. “Play it again.”
Red pressed the play button.
“F**k!” Arthur’s voice said one more time. “It’s there,” Red said. “Wait one second.” Crack.
A pinprick flash of white light in the dark background of her screen. Small, tiny. Like the little firework in her head. She dragged back through the frames again to play it one more time. There, a quick burst of light, just right of the center.
The muscles in Oliver’s mouth twitched.
“Which way were you pointing the phone, Red? Exactly.” His eyes fixed on hers, so hard that she had to look away, and yet she could still feel them when she blinked, like they’d marked her.
“This way.” Red pointed at a diagonal, out to the right toward the back of the RV.
Oliver straightened up, his eyes following the direction of her arm.
“So, he’s over there still,” he said. “Hard to say, but maybe a few hundred yards that way. Likely where he was when he first shot out the tires and the
windows. He must have gone back to the same position after planting the walkie-talkie.”
The walkie-talkie fizzed, hissing in silent agreement. Red was surprised, almost, that the sniper had nothing to say after what just happened.
The muscles in Oliver’s mouth shuddered again, but this time they broke into a wide smile that cracked his face in two.
“We did it, guys,” he said, looking around. The others didn’t react. “I said we did it!” Oliver laughed, hitting Red on the shoulder, moving to do the same to Arthur. Arthur still didn’t look right, eyes unfocused, picking at the pocket of his jeans. He was a fiddler, like Red, but maybe only when he was nervous, scared. Simon still didn’t look right either, puddled there on the floor, legs outstretched among large shards of broken mirror, staring up at the ceiling, breath heavy in his chest.
“Come on, guys! We did it, we’re getting out of here. Alive!”
Oliver pulled Reyna into a hug, burying a kiss in her thick black hair. He wrapped an arm around Maddy and then offered a hand to Simon, to pull him up off the floor.
Maddy was smiling now, hugging her own arms.
“Woohoo, spring break!” Simon said again, stumbling to his feet. Oliver stood in the middle, grinning at them all.
Delegate. Motivate. Celebrate. All the qualities of a natural leader, which made Red more than an unnatural one.
Oliver clapped his hands, somewhere between an applause and to get their attention. He already had it. “Right, the sniper is back that way.” He pointed. “So, if we climb out the driver’s-side window and run in that direction”—he pointed with the other arm, the exact opposite way—“the sniper won’t see us, because the RV will cover us. He won’t even know we’re gone. He won’t. And even if he does, he’s not going to be able to catch us. We have a head start, and he’s carrying a rifle.”
“You can’t shoot a rifle like that while running,” Red agreed.
“We did it,” Reyna said now, nodding, like she could only believe it if she heard it out of her own mouth.
“F**k yeah we did!” Simon answered, a fist raised as pieces of mirror crunched under his shoes. “Although that’s seven years’ bad luck, isn’t it? Broken mirror?”
“Well, it’s good luck for us now,” Maddy replied.
Behind Simon, there was a splintered hole in the wooden base of the dining booth, where the bullet had struck through after the mirror, probably out the other side of the RV back into the dark night. Through glass and wood and wood and plastic and metal. Skin and bone would be nothing in its path.
“Right then.” Oliver rubbed his hands together, the sound grating. “Let’s get the fuck out of this RV! Don’t bring anything with you. Just essentials. Just your phones. Hopefully we will run into some service at some point so we can call the police to catch this fucker before he runs off. And call our mom to let her know we escaped.”
Would Catherine have given up the name they were looking for by now, Red wondered, mind already leaving the RV, skipping away to the next part.
Her ears fizzed, but was that just the static?
“Shall we take this?” she asked, stepping across the broken mirror to grab the walkie-talkie from the table.
“No, leave it,” Oliver said, looking over his shoulder. “We don’t need it.
We’re not playing his game anymore.”
He walked over to the driver’s seat, leaning across it to rip off the duct tape securing Red’s gutted suitcase across the window. With one hard jerk he pulled it all down, dropping it in the footwell. He ripped the curtains aside, baring the pitch black of outside, waiting for them with open arms.
One windowpane was already open, smashed to pieces, but Oliver flicked the catch and slid the other panel across, uncovering that side instead. Easier to climb out of when standing on the driver’s seat.
“Will be a bit tight,” Oliver observed, rolling his shoulders. “Everyone got their phones? Yes? Okay.” He stood up on the driver’s seat, ducking as his head grazed the ceiling. “I’ll go first. Then Maddy, then Reyna, Red, Arthur, Simon.” He looked at them in order. “Get in line, get ready. No flashlights on yet, we don’t want him to be able to see anything. You drop down and just
run as fast as you can in this direction.” He pointed out beyond the driver’s-side mirror. “Through the trees there. Keep going, don’t wait for anyone. We’ll regroup on that road and then get the fuck out of here. Got it?”
Red nodded, taking her place between Reyna and Arthur, Maddy shuffling to the front. Lavoys first.
“I tell you what,” Simon said, from the back of the line. “I never want to see another fucking RV again as long as I live.”
“Tell me about it,” Reyna sniffed, almost a laugh. Fiddling, nervous energy, in front and behind Red.
“I’m going,” Oliver said, bending down and lowering one leg out the window, coming to sit on the frame, exactly halfway inside and halfway outside. He dipped his head under and out.
The static cut off, silence taking its place. Before:
“Hello.” The voice crackled to life behind them. Oliver paused, looking back inside the RV, listening.
“Cute trick with the mirror,” it said, a bark of laughter in his dark, metallic voice. “But there’s one thing I should tell you before you make the mistake of climbing out that driver’s-side window, Oliver. I probably should have told you sooner, that’s my fault.”
Static.
Red’s chest constricted, ribs folding in one by one like fingers as she turned to look back at the walkie-talkie, glaring at them from where she’d left it on the table. Her eyes crossed each other, the bright green display doubling itself, filling her head.
“How could he—” Reyna began.
“Oliver, don’t move!” Maddy shouted as he shifted out there on the window frame, staring down at the road just below him.
Silence, prickly and heavy.
“I should have told you,” the voice cut back in, sputtering at the edges. “There are two of us.”
