BORRASCA - Bagian 5 - Chapter 6 (English)

My body was moving but I wasn’t in control of it. I was suddenly walking across the street with the most intense rage I had ever felt. How dare she? How DARE she? I was in front of Meera before I could get back in control.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

She jumped and her eyes snapped up to my face in fear. “Ex-excuse me?” She pushed the kid behind her.

“Let go of my nephew.”

“What- who are you? This is my son!” She yelled. People were stopping to watch.

“That is Whitney Walker’s son and you know it, you cold-blooded, callous bitch.”

Meera’s face had gone white. “S- Sam?”

“Give me my fucking nephew, Meera.”

The boy started quietly crying and whispering “Mommy” in distress.

“What are you doing? Stop it!” Kimber was pulling at my arm, trying to turn me back towards the car but I wasn’t moving. I was seething with a fury I had suppressed for nine years.

“Owen!” Meera started screaming. “Owen, please!” Grady came sprinting out of the doorway of the stop next door. He took one look at the situation and pushed his wife and the boy behind him and raised his fist to hit me. But there was fear in his eyes.

“Let’s go, Sam!” I heard Kimber yell.

“Give me my nephew!” I screamed at Owen in a spitting, red rage and suddenly I felt a slap across my face. The strike served its purpose. Reality began to bleed back in to the world and I realized exactly where I was and what I was doing.

Kimber was standing in front of me in-between Owen and I. Her hood had fallen down in the commotion and her hair was spilling out of her beanie and down her back in a wild, bright waterfall of crimson. She looked scared. We were exposed.

Owen Grady lowered his fist and seemed to realize who I was. He began screaming at the top of his lungs. “Get the cops! Get the sheriff! Get him now!”

I was already moving, climbing into the driver’s seat of Kimber’s car leaving her no choice but to get in on the other side. She handed me the keys and I turned the car on and hit the gas, giving no regard to the slippery roads. Kimber screamed as I fishtailed trying to get off Main and then at every corner after – desperate to escape the scene I’d caused. The car slid into a snow drift just outside of town. I rocked the car in and out of drive and reverse until the tires finally found purchase on the road and then we were speeding out of town again. There were no other options; I’d blown it. I knew exactly where I needed to go now.

“Stop! Stop, and get out of the car, Sam – you’re high! You’ll kill us both! Don’t do their work for them!”

“That was Whitney’s son. That was my nephew.”

“Why would you think that, Sam?!”

“Because I know. I put it together years ago. You want me to trust you and your mysterious source? Well trust me when I say that that kid was my nephew.”

“Okay, just slow down please. Where are you taking us?”

“Where we should have gone in the first place.”

“No,” Kimber was shaking her head wildly. “Sam, no. We can’t go there, not yet.”

“Yeah, well I have to go. They know we’re here now, the sheriff will be hunting us by nightfall. It’s now or never.”

“But the car will never make it up that road!”

“Oh, I’m willing to bet that road is plowed.”

“Going all the way up to…to…”

“Yes.”

I was right. Less than two miles away, we found that road. It was one I had used only once and by all logic I should only barely remember it. But I had seen that dirt road in my nightmares for years. It was the road I had sped down trying to save my best friend. I’d failed then. I wouldn’t now.

We drove up the side of the mountain in Kimber’s Mazda at an unmanageable speed. I needed to get to Borrasca before the adrenaline wore off. I needed to kill them all – Clery, Prescott, my father, all the deputies, the local cops, everyone involved – and I needed to die doing it. I wanted to. But then where did that leave Kimber?

The higher we got up the mountain the clearer the air and the clearer my mind. The uncontrollable madness that had puppeted my every action for the last thirty minutes was draining away. I chanced a glance over at Kimber; her face was as pale as a moonbeam but her jaw was set in resolve. She was with me 100% even though we were on a suicide mission. My heart lurched. My death was inevitable, even acceptable, but Kimber had already suffered so much. I couldn’t bring her back to Borrasca, could I?

I slowed the car to a stop when I realized that I couldn’t remember why we were headed up to Borrasca in the first place. They knew we were here, right? No. Or did they? What had I done? I couldn’t remember what had happened in town but I didn’t want to admit it.

“Will you drive us back to the hotel?” I asked as my heart slowed and the strength begin to drain from my body.

“No,” Kimber said softly, staring into the trees next to us. She turned to look at me. “We’re already here.”

The road kept winding up the mountain but – subconsciously or not – I had stopped right at the proverbial gates of the north central mine, known as Hell on Earth to many, and Borrasca to the rest. I felt paralyzed, unable to move or speak or even think.  I listened intently for the sounds that had scored my nightmares, but all was as silent as death. They would know we were here – they would have heard us coming. It was now or never.

“Stay in the car, Kimber.” I told her and she gave me a look I couldn’t read as I opened the door.

I walked to back of the car, popped the trunk, and pulled out a 9mm Beretta I had seen when she’d showed me the guns on the highway. Checking to make sure the clip was loaded, I chambered a round. I knocked gently on Kimber’s window and she rolled it down, her eyes glued to the gun in my hand.

“Stay here,” I whispered. “And if you hear any gunfire, bolt.”

She gave me an appraising look. “I don’t think you’re in any space to do this right now.”    I knelt down in the snow so that I was eye level with her. “I agree with you. But this is the only chance we have, right?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question but she didn’t know that.

“Because of your fucking antics in town,” Kimber said icily. She opened the car door.  “I’ll go with you.”

“No!” I hissed into the cold, mountain air. But she was already walking to the back of the car and opening the trunk. I knew any confrontation with her at this point would be loud so I had to weigh my options carefully. Kimber pulled out the pump-action shotgun.

“Do you even know how to use that?” I asked.

Kimber racked the shotgun with one hand as she walked past me toward the mine. “Don’t mock me, Sam, you’d be very surprised what I know about guns.”

Her point taken, I ran to catch up. “You know if we do this now, we’ll never get the records. They’ll be dead, we’ll be dead, but Borrasca will just continue. Maybe we should just wait.”

“It was your idea to come here now.”

“I’m…. I’m having second thoughts.”

“But isn’t that your life, Sam? A series of second thoughts and regrets?” She snapped.

“Shhh! Jesus, Kimber! This is just recon, okay? Don’t get spotted and don’t make a fucking sound.” I whispered.

The snow this far up the mountain was almost a foot deep – there would be no hiding that we had been here if we somehow got out alive. We made our way into the camp using the trees as cover, and as we moved I noticed that the driveway into Borrasca showed no signs of tire tracks in the new snowfall. Were they sleeping up here? Were there sentries on duty, even now watching us? I turned around to find Kimber but she was now more than ten yards to my left and further away than I could hope to whisper.

The closer we got to camp the more I began to feel it. Something was wrong – very wrong. I could see the dorms through the trees, still standing exactly as I had remembered them, however the SKIN ND MIN sign had lost a support and was buckling precariously in the middle. The large building that housed the Shiny Gentleman was also still standing and the door had been left slightly ajar so that I could see the conveyor belt feeding into the machine. My blood, like everything else around me, froze to ice.

Kimber was suddenly beside me, her hand clenched around the shotgun which hung at her side.

“It’s gone,” she said, louder than I would have liked. She was right. It was too quiet.

“It looks that way,” I croaked, and bent over at the waist to quiet a sudden dizziness.

She turned to look at me, wide eyed and panicked. Tears began to well at the corners of her eyes. I stood up to give her a hug band she pushed me away. “It’s gone, it’s all gone.”

I took a few deep breaths. “Let me look around. We should check the dorms.”

Kimber tried to swallow a sob and I glanced over at her.  Had I really just suggested she walk back into the dorms after what had happened to her there? Was I that fucking cruel? I was a fucking mess.

I gently pushed the shotgun up and closer to her chest. “Stay here.”

I stepped out into the clearing in no particular hurry. If I was going to get shot, I sure as hell wasn’t going to die cramped and tired. But the air in camp was still and no bullets came out to meet me. I wanted to get in and out of the dorm as fast as possible. This was a terrible place; so much suffering, so much pain and death. If there was no enemy to kill, then I wanted to step off the hallowed grounds as quickly as I could and get the fuck out of there.

I opened the same door that Kyle and I had first gone into almost ten years before. The stench still lingered, drifting in the stale air and mingling with the fear and tension that had yet to dissipate after a decade.

But the beds were gone.

I went quickly from room to room and verified that the building was completely empty. Kimber saw me emerge from the other door and I gave her a shake of my head. I was only a few steps away from the building when I began to feel dizzy again. My vision narrowed and I started to lose control. The last thing I heard was Kimber’s voice as she screamed my name and then came the familiar, welcoming darkness.